Allegations of market manipulation abound in the popular press, particularly during the recent financial turmoil. However, many aspects of manipulation are poorly understood. The purpose of this thesis is to enhance our understanding of market manipulation by providing empirical evidence on the...

This paper examines the use, determinants and impact of anonymous orders in a market where disclosure of broker identity in the trading screen is voluntary. We find that most trading occurs non-anonymously, contrary to prior literature that suggests liquidity gravitates to anonymous markets. By...

We exploit a quasi-experiment to examine the effects of market makers and stock analysts in three emerging stock markets. We find substantial differences in the effects across markets and, in contrast to existing literature, the effects of market makers are not always positive. Our results...

A market is typically considered to dominate price discovery if it is the first to reflect new information about the fundamental value. Our simulations indicate that common price discovery metrics – Hasbrouck information share and Harris-McInish-Wood component share – are only consistent...

We examine returns, order flow, and market conditions in the minutes before, during, and after NYSE and Nasdaq short sales. We find two distinct types of short sales: those that provide liquidity, and those that demand it. Liquidity-supplying shorts are strongly contrarian at intraday horizons....

We model how ETFs compete and set fees. We show that ETF secondary market liquidity plays a key role in determining fees and leads to liquidity clienteles. More liquid ETFs charge higher fees in equilibrium and attract shorter horizon investors that are more sensitive to liquidity than to fees....

We develop a return variance decomposition model to separate the role of different types of information and noise in stock price movements. We disentangle four components: market-wide information, private firm-specific information revealed through trading, firm-specific information revealed...

Using the staggered entry of Chi-X in 12 European equity markets as a source of exogenous variation in high frequency trading (HFT), we find that HFT causes significant increases in co-movement in returns and in liquidity. About one-third of the increase in return co-movement is due to faster...

With the demise of traditional market makers and proliferation of trade execution algorithms that mix market and limit orders, it is no longer clear who provides liquidity in limit order book markets and what determines their liquidity provision decisions. To examine these issues, we develop and...

This paper examines how gambling-motivated trading affects aggregate financial market outcomes. Using a unique global gambling data set covering 39 countries, we show that the dollar volume of stock market gambling is at least 3.5 times the combined volume of “traditional” gambling outlets...