Market liquidity is typically characterized by a number of ad hoc metrics, such as depth (or market impact), volume, intermediation costs (such as breadth) etc. No general coherent denition seems to exist, and few attempts have been made to justify the existing metrics on welfare grounds. In...

Market liquidity is typically characterized by a number of ad hoc metrics, such as depth, volume, bid-ask spreads etc. No general coherent denition seems to exist, and few attempts have been made to justify the existing metrics on welfare grounds. In this paper we propose a welfare-based...

We develop a tractable model in which trade is generated by asymmetry in agents' information sets. We show that, even if news are not generated by a stochastic volatility process, in the presence of information treatment and/or order processing costs, the (unique) equilibrium price process is...