1 2 3 Sovereign Debt Auctions: Uniform or Discriminatory? 4 5 Menachem Brenner 6 Stern School of Business, New York University 7 Email:
[email protected] 8 9 Dan Galai 10 Jerusalem School of Business, Hebrew University of Jerusalem 11 Email:
[email protected] 12 13 Orly Sade 14 Jerusalem School of Business, Hebrew University of Jerusalem 15 and Stern School of Business, New York University 16 Email:
[email protected] 17 18 19 20 November 2008 21 22 23 24 25 We would like to thank the editor, Robert King and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments and 26 suggestions. We benefited from discussions with Bill Allen, Bruno Biais, Peter Cramton, Kenneth Garbade, Avner 27 Kalay, Marco Pagano, Michal Passerman, Jesus M. Salas, Anthony Saunders, Raghu Sundaram, Avi Wohl, Yishay 28 Yafeh, and Jaime Zender. We thank Moran Ofir for her excellent research assistance. We would also like to thank 29 the participants of the 2006 European Finance Association Meeting in Zurich, MTS 2006, Istanbul and FUR XIII 30 2006, Rome. We also benefited from comments received from the participants of seminars at Tel-Aviv University, 31 IDC (Israel), NYU, the University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, University of 32 Utah, University of Houston and the Federal Reserve Bank of NY. We thank “The Caesarea Edmond Benjamin de 33 Rothschild Center for Capital Markets and Risk” at IDC, the Krueger Center for Finance and the Zagagi Center at the 34 Hebrew University of Jerusalem for partial financial support. 35 36 37 38 39 Sovereign Debt Auctions: Uniform or Discriminatory? 40 41 Abstract 42 43 Many financial assets, especially government bonds, are issued by an auction.