Recent Developments of Interdealer Brokerage in the Japanese Secondary Bond Markets
描述了日本二级债券市场交易商间经纪业务的发展，指出其通过降低买卖价差提高了交易效率，并分析了三种交易渠道的作用。
The large volume of government bonds issued since 1975 has been a strong driving force for structural change in the Japanese bond markets during the last decade. The increasing amount of outstanding government bonds has made the trading volume in the secondary market increase rapidly, accompanied with the development of interdealer trading. This interdealer trading system is an interesting and impressive phenomena, one that has developed as the Japanese bond market changed, and is important analytically as well. The development of this institution gives researchers an op? portunity to measure the increased efficiency of the developing market. This pa? per attempts to describe the development of these markets, point out the role that interdealer markets have played in improving the transactional efficiency of these markets, and document the benefits?in the form of lowered commission spreads (lowered liquidity cost)?that have accrued to the users of financial mar? kets in Japan as they pay less for the liquidity services provided by dealers. We will define transactional efficiency in this single dimension, lowered bid-ask spreads. Prior research in this area [4] has examined the conditions under which interdealer trading occurs in securities markets and pointed out that such trading may impose limits on the divergence of inventories among dealers that would decrease the market bid and ask spreads. In this paper, interdealer trading means the transactions of bonds among securities companies functioning as a dealer in the over-the-counter market (OTC market). To put it another way, the interdealer market could be regarded as a wholesale market, and the OTC market as a retail one. At present, trading is put into practice through three kinds of channels: the direct transactions among secu? rities companies, the Nihon Sohgo Shohken or bond broker (called BB), and the block trade of government bonds (BTGB) administrated by the Securities Ex? change. In the case of direct transactions, a dealer must seek out a compatible trading partner by himself. As discussed later, however, those transactions in the