Cables, Sharks and Servers: Technology and the Geography of the Foreign Exchange Market

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may AbstractWe analyze the impact of technology on production and trade in services, focusing on the foreign exchange market. We identify exogenous technological changes by the connection of countries to submarine fiberoptic cables used for electronic trading, but which were not laid for purposes related to the foreign exchange market. We estimate the impact of cable connections on the share of offshore foreign exchange transactions. Cable connections between local markets and matching servers in the major financial centers lower the fixed costs of trading currencies and increase the share of currency trades occurring onshore. At the same time, however, they attenuate the effect of standard spatial frictions such as distance, local market liquidity, and restrictive regulations that otherwise prevent transactions from moving to the major financial centers. Our estimates suggest that the second effect dominates. Technology dampens the impact of spatial frictions by up to 80 percent and increases, in net terms, the share of offshore trading by 21 percentage points. Technology also has economically important implications for the distribution of foreign exchange transactions across financial centers, boosting the share in global turnover of London, the world's largest trading venue, by as much as one-third. Non-technical summaryThe impact of technology on services, and specifically on where services are produced and traded, is one of the great unanswered questions of the post-industrial age. One view is that cheap information and communication technology (ICT) significantly attenuates the effect of distance and other trading barriers on the geography of production. Another view is that distance and other trading barriers still matter significantly. In this paper we shed light on this debate using the global foreign exchange market as a case study.What might be called the "Flat World" hypothesis (after Friedman 2005) is that location, distance and other aspects of geography no longer matter in a ubiquitous 24-7 FX marketplace. In a world of high-speed communication, foreign exchange transactions can take place anywhere and should be observed in a growing number of places, reflecting the availability of relevant inputs.Alternatively, what might be called the "Flash Boys" hypothesis (after Lewis 2014) suggests that location matters more importantly than ever in a 21st-century foreign exchange market characterized by competiti...

Geographic Spread of Currency Trading: The Renminbi and Other Emerging Market Currencies

“…Similar to a study by Griliches (1957), we describe a diffusion process with three parameters: the initial conditions, which we observe; the speed of diffusion, which we infer from the data; and the ultimate endpoint, which we posit. 1 The closest work to ours is that of Eichengreen et al (2016) who found that submarine fiber optic cables led to the loss of market share of the home foreign exchange market and the gain of offshore centers. In light of these findings, Mehl (2017) interpreted the euro area's loss of market share in trading the euro against other currencies and London's parallel gain as reflecting "London's trading cables."…”

“…London's particular strength in FX can be ascribed to its time zone advantage. 4 Over time, the share of offshore trading in currencies has tended to rise; see McCauley and Scatigna (2011), Ehlers and Packer (2013), Eichengreen et al (2016) and Mehl (2017).…”

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