The topic for this conference, "Financial Market Structure and Dynamics," was selected to highlight some current research on financial markets.1 Most of the papers presented at the conference could be considered to be within the "market microstructure" literature. Market microstructure is a relatively new branch of financial economics that seeks to explain how latent supply and demand for financial assets are transformed into transactions, and how this process drives asset-price dynamics. Market microstructure research investigates the institutional structure of financial markets, including information distribution patterns and the resulting incentives structure faced by market participants. This, in turn, helps to explain the behaviour of the participants, the markets, and the resulting asset-price discovery process. The study of market microstructure can make important contributions to central banking, which suggests that it should be a core area of central bank research.