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I propose a new measure that identifies when the market price of an over-the-counter traded asset is below its fundamental value due to selling pressure. The measure is the difference between prices paid by small traders and those paid by large traders. In a model for overthe-counter trading with search frictions and periods with selling pressures, I show that this measure identifies liquidity crises (i.e., high number of forced sellers). Using a structural estimation, the model is able to identify liquidity crises in the U.S. corporate bond market based on the relative prices paid by small and large traders. New light is shed on two crises, the downgrade of General Motors and Ford in 2005 and the subprime crisis.

We propose a model of trade in over-the-counter (OTC) markets in which each dealer with private information can engage in bilateral transactions with other dealers, as determined by her links in a network. Each dealer's strategy is represented as a quantity-price schedule. We analyze the effect of trade decentralization and adverse selection on information diffusion, expected profits, trading costs, and welfare. Information diffusion through prices is not affected by dealers' strategic trading motives, and there is an informational externality that constrains the informativeness of prices. Trade decentralization can both increase or decrease welfare. A dealer's trading cost is driven by both her own and her counterparties' centrality. Central dealers tend to learn more, trade more at lower costs, and earn higher expected profit.

Over-the-counter (OTC) markets dominate trading in many asset classes. Will electronic trading displace traditional OTC \"voice\" trading? Can electronic and voice systems coexist? What types of securities and trades are best suited for electronic trading? We study these questions by focusing on an innovation in electronic trading technology that enables investors to simultaneously search many bond dealers. We show that periodic one-sided electronic auctions are a viable and important source of liquidity even in inactively traded instruments. These mechanisms are a natural compromise between bilateral search in OTC markets and continuous double auctions in electronic limit order books.

We characterize the role of benchmarks in price transparency of over-the-counter markets. A benchmark can raise social surplus by increasing the volume of beneficial trade, facilitating more efficient matching between dealers and customers, and reducing search costs. Although the market transparency promoted by benchmarks reduces dealers' profit margins, dealers may nonetheless introduce a benchmark to encourage greater market participation by investors. Low-cost dealers may also introduce a benchmark to increase their market share relative to high-cost dealers. We construct a revelation mechanism that maximizes welfare subject to search frictions, and show conditions under which it coincides with announcing the benchmark.

We examine the network of trading relationships between insurers and dealers in the over-the-counter (OTC) corporate bond market. Regulatory data show that one-third of insurers use a single dealer, whereas other insurers have large dealer networks. Execution prices are nonmonotone in network size, initially declining with more dealers but increasing once networks exceed 20 dealers. A model of decentralized trade in which insurers trade off the benefits of repeat business and faster execution quantitatively fits the distribution of insurers' network size and explains the price-network size relationship. Counterfactual analysis shows that regulations to unbundle trade and nontrade services can decrease welfare.

We propose a model in which investors may choose to acquire costly information that identifies good assets and purchase these assets in opaque (OTC) markets. Uninformed investors access an asset pool that has been cream-skimmed by informed investors. When the quality composition of assets for sale is fixed, there is too much information acquisition and the financial industry extracts excessive rents. In the presence of moral hazard in origination, the social value of information varies inversely with information acquisition. Low quality origination is associated with large rents in the financial sector. Equilibrium acquisition of information is generically inefficient.

We propose a new model of trading in over-the-counter markets. Dealers accumulate inventories by trading with end-investors and trade among each other to reduce their inventory holding costs. Core dealers use a more efficient trading technology than peripheral dealers, who are heterogeneously connected to core dealers and trade with each other bilaterally. Connectedness affects prices and allocations if and only if the peripheral dealers' aggregate inventory position differs from zero. Price dispersion increases in the size of this position. The model generates new predictions about the effects of dealers' connectedness and dealers' aggregate inventories on prices.

Using a complete record of U.S. over-the-counter (OTC) secondary trades in corporate bonds, we estimate average transaction costs as a function of trade size for each bond that traded more than nine times between January 2003 and January 2005. We find that transaction costs decrease significantly with trade size. Highly rated bonds, recently issued bonds, and bonds close to maturity have lower transaction costs than do other bonds. Costs are lower for bonds with transparent trade prices, and they drop when the TRACE system starts to publicly disseminate their prices. The results suggest that public traders benefit significantly from price transparency.

We study the information in order flows in the world's largest over-the-counter market, the foreign exchange (FX) market. The analysis draws on a data set covering a broad cross-section of currencies and different customer segments of FX end-users. The results suggest that order flows are highly informative about future exchange rates and provide significant economic value. We also find that different customer groups can share risk with each other effectively through the intermediation of a large dealer, and differ markedly in their predictive ability, trading styles, and risk exposure.

We provide the impact on asset prices of search-and-bargaining frictions in over-the-counter markets. Under certain conditions, illiquidity discounts are higher when counterparties are harder to find, when sellers have less bargaining power, when the fraction of qualified owners is smaller, or when risk aversion, volatility, or hedging demand is larger. Supply shocks cause prices to jump, and then \"recover\" over time, with a time signature that is exaggerated by search frictions: The price jump is larger and the recovery is slower in less liquid markets. We discuss a variety of empirical implications.