The Liquidity Service of Benchmark Securities⁄yKathy YuanRoss School of Business,University of MichiganFebruary 2005AbstractWe demonstrate that benchmark securities allow heterogeneouslyinformedinvestorstocreatetradingstrategiesthatareperfectlyalignedwith their signals. Investors who are informed about security-speciflcrisks but uninformed about systematic risks can take an ofisettingposition in benchmark securities to eliminate exposure to adverse se-lection in systematic risks, while investors who are informed aboutsystematicrisksbutuninformedaboutsecurity-speciflcriskscantrade risks exclusively using benchmark securities. We furthershow that introduction of benchmark securities encourages more in-vestors to acquire both security-speciflc and systematic-factor infor-mation, which leads to increased liquidity and price informativenessfor all individual securities. (JEL: G10, G12, G14)⁄Acknowledgements: This paper is based on a chapter in my dissertation at the Mas-sachusetts Institute of Technology. I thank my advisors Paul Krugman, Jeremy Stein,and Jiang Wang, as well as Dimitri Vayanos, Andrea Eisenfeld, Emre Ozdenoren, PaoloPasquariello, Matthew Spiegel, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, and the seminar participantsat the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, the NBER 2001Summer Institute, the 2002 American Finance Association Meetings, and the 2002 UtahWinter Finance Conference for helpful comments. I also thank Franklin Allen, ...
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