Katya Malinova
Associate Professor of Finance (with tenure)
Mackenzie Investments Chair in Evidence-Based Investment Management
DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University
I study how the design of financial markets shapes trading costs, liquidity, competition, and who gets to see market information. My work sits at the intersection of market microstructure and financial technology: exchange fees and rebates, market-data pricing, dark trading, automated market makers, and tokenized securities.
My research has appeared in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, Management Science, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Journal of Financial Markets, and Research Policy. I am an Associate Editor of the Journal of Financial Markets and Financial Management, and an Editor of the Journal of Financial Technology.
Alongside the academic work, I collaborate with Canadian securities regulators. I co-chair the Canadian Securities Administrators' Retail Committee on access to real-time market data, having previously co-chaired the CSA's Data Fees Methodology Industry Committee, and I serve on the Research Advisory Council of the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE in Frankfurt. I am a Fellow of the Crypto and Blockchain Economics Research Forum. Before joining DeGroote in 2018 I was a tenured faculty member in the Department of Economics at the University of Toronto.
malinovk [at] mcmaster.ca SSRN Google Scholar Slides
News
A draft of "Dethroning the Dollar? Optimal Multi-Asset Market Making" (with Andreas Park) is now available on SSRN. Can a single multi-currency pool beat routing every trade through the U.S. dollar? Abstract and summary.
"Dethroning the Dollar? Optimal Multi-Asset Market Making" (with Andreas Park) accepted for presentation at the Warwick Business School Gillmore Centre Conference on DeFi & Digital Currencies, The Shard, London, 21 September, and the 8th Sydney Market Microstructure and Digital Finance Meeting, 9–10 December.
"The Data Toll" (with Andreas Park) accepted for presentation at the 10th SAFE Market Microstructure Conference, LMU Munich, 18 September. Paper coming soon.
"Tokenized Stocks for Trading and Capital Raising" (with Andreas Park) is published in Research Policy, 55(7), September 2026 — open access.
Elected a Fellow of the Crypto and Blockchain Economics Research (CBER) Forum, a multi-university collaboration bridging blockchain scholarship and practice. The fellowship places me alongside researchers from Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Columbia, Duke, and Chicago.
SSHRC Insight Grant awarded for "Reimagining Equity Market Design: Data Fees, Platform Competition, and Asset Tokenization" (2026–2029).
The CSA published the Data Fees Methodology Committee Report on access to real-time market data, the work of the industry committee I co-chaired, in English and French.
Selected to co-chair the Canadian Securities Administrators' new Retail Committee, which reviews access to and pricing of real-time market data for individual investors.
Book chapter "When Do Tokens Beat Equity? The Economics of Utility Tokens" (with Andreas Park) published in The Blockchain Scholars Book (Palgrave Macmillan).
Current projects
- Dethroning the Dollar? Optimal Multi-Asset Market Making — can a multi-currency automated market maker beat routing every trade through the U.S. dollar?
- The Data Toll — how the price of market data can lock in incumbent exchanges.
- Rebate as Bait: Maker-Taker Fees and Access Rents — why exchanges pay rebates that lose them trading revenue.
- Learning from DeFi: Would Automated Market Makers Improve Equity Trading? — under review.
Microstructure Exchange
I co-founded and co-organize The Microstructure Exchange, a bi-weekly online seminar in market microstructure with refereed and invited talks and 60–150 participants per session.