The official site of Italy's central bank

No. 906 - Price discovery in the Italian sovereign bonds market: the role of order flow

This paper studies how family firms reacted to the 2008 economic crisis by adjusting employment. This paper analyses the price discovery process and the informational role of trading in the Italian wholesale secondary markets for Treasury bonds: the B2B MTS cash and the B2C BondVision trading venues. Using daily data for a representative set of fixed rate government bonds over the period January 2007 - February 2012, we find that the B2C dealer-to-customer market contributes to the process of price formation to a greater extent than the B2B interdealer platform. The informational role of trading is found to be considerable: order flow is a key variable in the process of price formation and appears to continuously act on a cross market basis. Moreover, the explanatory role of order flow turns out to be stronger when liquidity conditions are poorer.