Is shareholder interest in corporate social responsibility driven by pecuniary motives (abnormal rates of return) or non-pecuniary ones (willingness to sacrifice returns to address various firm externalities)? To answer this question, we categorize the literature into seven tests: (1) costs of...

We show that following a tick size reduction in a decimal public limit order book (PLB) market quality and welfare fall for illiquid but increase for liquid stocks. If a Sub-Penny Venue (SPV) starts competing with a penny-quoting PLB, market quality deteriorates for illiquid, low priced stocks,...

This study examines whether mutual funds herd in industries and the extent to which such herding impacts industry valuations. Using two herding measures proposed by Lakonishok et al. (1992) and Sias (2004) we document that mutual funds herd in industries. We show that industry herding is not...

We develop a new method for detecting portfolio manager activity. Our method relies exclusively on portfolio returns and, consequently, avoids the pitfalls associated with disclosed portfolio holdings. We investigate the link between activity and performance of actively managed U.S. equity funds...

We propose a new method of testing asset pricing models that relies on using quantities rather than prices or returns. We use the capital flows into and out of mutual funds to infer which risk model investors use. We derive a simple test statistic that allows us to infer, from a set of candidate...

We define low-latency activity as strategies that respond to market events in the millisecond environment, the hallmark of proprietary trading by high-frequency traders though it could include other algorithmic activity as well. We propose a new measure of low-latency activity to investigate the...

Facing investment choices, investors may care more about potentially excess losses in a downtrend market than excess gains in an upside market. Conditional Sharpe ratios (CSR) are statistical ordinates of conditional stochastic dominance (CSD) that measure lower partial risk-adjusted excess...

New theories have emerged over the past 10 years that reveal CEFs to be an important and efficient organizational device. This review surveys the old and current literature on closed-end funds (CEFs) in general and theories of discounts in particular. Among the topics reviewed are liquidity...

We investigate the effects of competition and signaling in a pure order driven market and examine the trading patterns of agents when walking through the book is not allowed. Our results suggest that the variables capturing the cost of a large market order are not informative for an impatient...

We examine the cost of liquidity in rates on CDs purchased by money market funds (MMFs). We find no evidence that rates vary directly with the size of CDs. However, we do find that large MMFs receive higher rates on large CDs than small MMFs. This suggests banks pay for (potential) liquidity.