Closing auctions set daily closing prices for U.S. stocks and account for a striking 7.5% of daily volume in 2018, up from 3.1% in 2010. We study the causes and implications of this major trend. Difference-in-difference analyses suggest that closing volume is fueled directly and indirectly by...

We train a machine learning method on a class of informed trades to develop a new measure of informed trading, the Informed Trading Intensity (``ITI''). ITI increases before earnings, M&A, and news announcements, and has implications for return reversal and asset pricing. ITI is effective...

A model of infrequent rebalancing can explain specific predictability patterns in the time-series and cross-section of stock returns. First, infrequent rebalancing produces return autocorrelations that are consistent with empirical evidence from intraday returns and new evidence from daily...

I investigate cross-sectional variation in stock returns over the trading day and overnight to shed light on what drives asset pricing anomalies. Margin requirements are higher overnight, and lending fees are typically charged only on positions held overnight. Such institutional constraints and...

We investigate the impact of an exogenous trading glitch at a high-frequency market-making firm on standard measures of stock liquidity (spreads, price impact, turnover, and depth) and institutional trading costs (implementation shortfall and VWAP slippage). Stocks in which the firm accumulates...

We examine the relation between liquidity, volume, and volatility using a comprehensive sample of U.S. stocks in the post-decimalization period. For large stocks, effective spread and volume are positively related in the time series even after controlling for volatility, contrary to most...

I investigate seasonalities in a set of well-known anomalies in the cross-section of U.S. stock returns. A January seasonality goes beyond a size effect and strongly affects most anomalies, which can even switch sign in January. Return seasonality exists outside of January depending on the month...

We identify Industry-Neutral Self-Financed Informed Trading (INSFIT) by long only fund managers who possess a positive short-lived private signal and self finance informed stock purchases by selling an equivalent dollar amount of stock in the same industry. INSFIT, which constitutes less than 1%...

We derive testable implications of Kyle and Obizhaeva's (2016) notion of "bet invariance'' for the cross-section of trade-time volatilities. We jointly develop theoretical foundations of "no speculative arbitrage'' whose implications incorporate those of bet invariance. Our proposed test...

Dramatic microstructure changes in equity markets have made standard liquidity measures less accurate proxies of trading costs. We develop trade-time liquidity measures that reflect per-dollar price impacts of fixed-dollar volumes. Our measures (i) better capture institutional trading costs; and...