This paper evaluates alternative methods for classifying individual trades as market buy or market sell orders using intraday trade and quote data. The authors document two potential problems with quote-based methods of trade classification: quotes may be recorded ahead of trades that triggered...

The authors use predictions of aggregate stock return variances from daily data to estimate time-varying monthly variances for size-ranked portfolios. The authors propose and estimate a single factor model of heteroskedasticity for portfolio returns. This model implies time-varying betas....

The authors examine whether greater futures-trading activity (volume and open interest) is associated with greater equity volatility. They partition each trading activity series into expected and unexpected components, and document that while equity volatility covaries positively with unexpected...

Following the crash of 1987, one contentious regulatory issue has been whether margin activity exacerbated the decline in equity values. The authors contrast the crash behavior of NASDAQ securities eligible for margin trading with the behavior of ineligible ones. Consistent with the hypothesis...

The authors use a robust regression estimator to analyze the risk premia on size and book-to-market. They find that the risk premium on size that was estimated by Eugene F. Fama and Kenneth R. French (1992) completely disappears when the 1 percent most extreme observations are trimmed each...

For New York Stock Exchange listed securities, the price execution of seemingly comparable orders differs systematically by location. In general, executions at the Cincinnati, Midwest, and New York stock exchanges are most favorable to trade initiators, while executions at the National...

This paper examines the proposition that fluctuations in discounts of closed-end funds are driven by changes in individual investor sentiment. The theory implies that discounts on various funds move together, that new funds get started when seasoned funds sell at a premium or a small discount,...