The paper examines the impact of margins, adjusted for underlying price risk proxied by market volatility, on trading volume and at the same time incorporates the relationship between trading volume and price volatility documented in equities and futures markets. The study estimates bivariate GARCH-M models to take account of the inter-relationships and applies them to the Greek derivatives market over the period 1999-2005. The results show that when adjusting margins for market risk there is no impact on trading volume, casting doubts on the results of previous research, and providing support for the view that margin requirements are used only as a mechanism to prevent trader default.
We examine the effects of margin changes on futures trading activity, the composition of traders and market liquidity, using an account level data set from the Taiwan Futures Exchange. We find that margin increases reduce trading activity for all trader types, which is consistent with the hypothesis that higher margins increase the costs of trading. Institutional traders are more sensitive to changes in margin requirements than individual traders, because their trading activity decreases significantly more than that of individual traders. This in turn leads to increases in market price volatility and decreases in market liquidity. These results imply that margin requirement is not an effective policy tool in limiting the trading activity of noise speculators to reduce market volatility.
In light of the recently passed 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, we assess the effect of margin changes on prices, the risk-sharing between speculators and hedgers, and the price stability of 20 commodity futures markets. We find that margin increases decrease the rate at which prices change, yet they impair the risk sharing function and they decrease market liquidity in certain markets. The regulator should set margins by taking the heterogeneity of commodity futures markets into account. Certain effects of margin changes diffuse across related markets though. Our results are robust to endogenously set margins by the exchanges and to alternative ways of measuring market liquidity. Interestingly, the effect of margin changes is more pronounced in commodity futures markets than in major equity and interest rate futures markets.
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