This study is concerned with the lead-lag relationship between Turkish spot equity and derivatives markets. In the study, the spot equity market is represented by the ISE-30 Index. In order to compare the structure of the two markets, the futures contract written on the ISE-30 Index, namely TURKDEX-ISE 30, is chosen to represent the derivatives market. The analysis is performed over the sample period beginning February 4, 2005 and ending on December 10, 2010 which actually covers the entire time span from the establishment of the TURKDEX market until the end of last year. This sample period is examined on the basis of 5-minute intervals during the trading day, enabling a more detailed and accurate evaluation of the lead-lag power of the markets. The main methods applied to examine the structure of information flow between the markets are co-integration and causality analyses. Different approaches of these basic methods are employed as well in order to provide robust results. An additional robustness check is provided through examining the relationship between the markets by using both raw and filtered prices. ARMA filtering is performed on the prices and these findings are compared to those obtained by raw prices in order to avoid the problem of infrequent trading. Outcomes of both raw and filtered price analyses reveal that in 2006, 2007 and 2009 the relationship between the markets is bi-directional, whereas in 2008 and 2010, futures market strictly leads the spot market. Filtered and raw analyses do not have a definitive conclusion regarding the lead-lag relationship in 2005. For this year, while the raw data support a bi-directional relationship, ARMA filtering indicates that the spot market leads the derivatives market.

Two essays are comprised in this dissertation to explore how market friction affects the processes of price formation. The first essay investigates on both theoretical and empirical bases how segmentation of communication amongst potential lenders can influence loan contracts. Two cases are considered. The first one assumes that potential lenders can freely communicate with each other; the second one assumes that each potential lender can only observe the decisions of its predecessors. I show theoretically that the ex post observed interest rate will be higher and the probability of syndication failure will be lower if the potential lenders cannot communicate freely with each other. These predictions are confirmed by my empirical work. Using a novel proxy, relational distance, for the segmentation of communication, I show that the larger the relational distance, the higher is the loan spread and the lower is the probability of syndication failure. In addition, the relational distance is positively correlated with the probability of the existence of non-price contract terms, such as the requirement for collateral and guarantees. My conclusions are found to be robust to endogeneity issues, potentially omitted variables and alternative model specifications. The second essay focuses on the informational effects between futures market and its spot market. Intraday data are used to investigate the lead-lag relationship between the TX returns, the TX trading activity and the TAIEX stock index returns. I focus on the transmission direction and the source of information and find that there are specific lead-lag relationships between futures returns and spot returns, in addition to the contemporaneous relationship predicted by carry-cost theory and efficient market theory. The results show that futures returns significantly lead spot returns, which suggests that informed trades occur in the futures market and makes information flows from the futures market to the spot market. By distinguishing different types of futures traders and using private information, net open buy, as a proxy for futures trading activity, I found that the major source of informed trades is foreign institutional traders because their trading activity have predictive power for future movements in both spot and futures prices. In contrary, traders in the other categories carry no information about the directional changes in both spot and futures prices.