ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a concept of financial markets that will encompass all financial products offered in such markets, independent of the specifics of national markets or products offered by segments of a somewhat loosely defined ‘aggregate’ financial market. Section 4.2 uses the characteristics approach to develop definitions of a financial product and a financial market. Section 4.3 demonstrates how these definitions can be used to explore the impact of regulatory and technological changes on the demand side of financial markets. Reforms of the UK stock market are briefly considered to demonstrate how the model might be used to analyse the effects of regulatory and technological change. Section 4.4 briefly considers the supply side, though most of the chapter is devoted to a specification of the demand side because this is where the greatest gaps in the literature occur. Section 4.5 concludes and explores avenues for further research.
