Academy Fellow

My research is driven by a central question: how do the rules and institutions governing financial markets affect their ability to serve investors and companies? Working at the intersection of academic research and market practice, I examine how competition, transparency and trading mechanisms shape liquidity, price discovery and access to capital. My approach is to use changes in market rules and detailed trading data to identify economic mechanisms and inform choices faced by regulators and market participants.

My research establishes an important link between secondary-market structure and the cost of capital. While trading arrangements are often evaluated by their effects on liquidity and transaction costs, my work demonstrates that these effects extend to the cost of raising equity and debt. Evidence from US equity markets shows that reforms reducing institutional trading costs also lower the cost of issuing equity. In corporate bond markets, I show that greater post-trade transparency reduces debt issuance costs by improving information available to investors when new bonds are sold. These findings demonstrate that the design of secondary markets can have broader consequences for capital allocation and the real economy.

A second major contribution is to develop a more nuanced understanding of market transparency and its regulation. My research on dark trading shows that its effects depend on how much trading occurs in the dark, how order flow is segmented, and who can access different venues. Limited dark trading can support market quality, but excessive activity can undermine price discovery. Rules restricting segmentation can improve liquidity while shifting the benefits of trading among investors, and selective venue access can reduce information leakage and adverse selection. The broader insight is that no single trading arrangement maximises all aspects of market quality: market design must account for underlying economic mechanisms, competing objectives and distributional effects.

This research agenda has been informed by direct engagement with policymakers and market participants, in Australia and internationally. As an economic consultant to ASIC, I contributed to its analysis of equity-market structure ahead of the introduction of competition between equities trading venues in Australia. I have also served on ASIC's Markets Consultative Panel and advised regulators, exchanges and participants in other jurisdictions. These engagements have helped generate research questions, provided institutional context and offered channels through which empirical findings can contribute to policy.

More recently, ASIC commissioned my research into the changing relationship between public and private capital markets. This work evaluates evidence on the health and competitiveness of public markets, the growth of private capital and implications for transparency, investor choice and access to finance. It informed ASIC's public and private markets discussion paper and subsequent regulatory roadmap.

Across my research, I have sought to advance our understanding of how market institutions shape economic outcomes, while providing evidence to help regulators design markets that better serve investors, companies and the wider economy.

Professor of Finance, University of Melbourne

Graduate Australian Institute of Company Directors

1.Differential access to dark markets and execution outcomes, with James Brugler, Journal of Financial Economics 2025 171, 104086.

2.Secondary Market Transparency and Corporate Bond Issuing Costs, with James Brugler and J. Spencer Martin, Review of Finance 2022 26(1): 43-77.

3.Does Financial Market Structure Impact the Cost of Capital? with James Brugler and Terry Hendershott, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 2021 56(5): 1771-1808.

4.Regulating dark trading: Order flow segmentation and market quality, with Katya Malinova and Andreas Park, Journal of Financial Economics 2018, 130(2): 347-366.

5.Dark trading and price discovery, with Talis Putnins, Journal of Financial Economics 2015, 118:70-92.