Flash Crash Research, Part 2

A couple of papers I spotted a while ago:
Easey et al study a measure of order flow toxicity called Volume-Synchronized Probability of Informed Trading in The Microstructure of the ‘Flash Crash’: Flow Toxicity, Liquidity Crashes and the Probability of Informed Trading. Johnson et al considers a large number of mini-flash crashes from 2006 to 2011 in Financial black swans driven by ultrafast machine ecology [PDF].

Microstructure Modeling

Jonathan Kinlay has an interesting list of papers on market microstructure including his synopsis of each. Many of them applied a vector autoregression model to quote and trade data. The focus, however, is always the impact of the limit order book and the strategies for generating new bids and asks on the limit order book. All of the studies focused on the stock markets. Perhaps the most interesting of the papers is a recent one on Price Dynamics in a Markovian Limit Order Market from Rama Cont of Columbia, which provides a mostly analytical model for high frequency dynamics of prices and order flow with endogenous relationship between durations and price changes. Most of the data in this study came from 2008. According to that data, for certain DJ stocks, ~1.2% of observed bid-ask spreads were more than 1 tick, thus not as pertinent to the model. The average lifetime of such a spread appears to be only a couple of milliseconds. The model does consider order flow in the presence of market orders and cancellations, including the case when they dominate limit orders.

I also found a number of books on the subject (more after the jump).