Whether proprietary traders provide or take liquidity, and how their behavior evolves over the business cycle and across stocks, remains at the center of an ongoing debate. Using a unique dataset from the NYSE, we document that proprietary traders concentrate their trades in large and liquid...

The trading of shares of the same firm in multiple markets has become common over the last thirty years, but there is little empirical evidence on the extent to which investors actively exploit multimarket environments. We introduce a volume-based measure of multimarket trading to address this...

We show that market-maker balance sheet and income statement variables explain time variation in liquidity, suggesting liquidity-supplier financing constraints matter. Using 11 years of NYSE specialist inventory positions and trading revenues, we find that aggregate market-level and specialist...

Asquith, Oman, and Safaya (2010) conclude that short sales are often misclassified by the Lee-Ready algorithm. The algorithm identifies most short sales as buyer-initiated, whereas the authors posit that short sales should be overwhelmingly seller-initiated. Using order data to identify true...

This article examines how the market quality of European cross-listed stocks is affected by the partial-day availability of close substitutes, i.e., shares of the same companies that are traded in their home markets but are not fully fungible with the cross-listed shares. Our findings suggest...

We examine the market quality effects of technology upgrades juxtaposed with short-sale bans. Between 2011 and 2013, the Spanish Stock Exchange introduced a smart trading platform (SIBE-Smart) and colocation to facilitate high-speed trading, and they also imposed two short-sale bans. We find...

We use a proprietary dataset to test the implications of several asymmetric information models on how short-lived private information affects trading strategies and liquidity provision. Our identification rests on information acquisition before analyst recommendations are publically announced....

Using a database of daily institutional trades, we document that a majority of short-term institutional trades lose money. In aggregate, over 23% of round-trip trades are held for less than three months, and the returns on these trades average -3.91% (non-annualized). These losses are pervasive...

We document strong weekly lead-lag return predictability across stocks from different industries with no customer-supplier linkages (economically unrelated stocks). Between 1980 and 2010, the industry-neutral long-short hedge portfolio earns an average of over 19 basis points per week. This...

We propose a parsimonious metric – the Adjusted Benford score (AB-score) – to improve the detection of financial misstatements. Based on Benford's Law, which predicts the leading-digit distribution of naturally occurring numbers, the AB-score estimates a firm-year's likelihood of financial...