We model competition for liquidity provision between high-frequency traders (HFTs) and slower execution algorithms designed to minimize transaction costs for buy-side institutions (B-Algos). Under continuous pricing, B-Algos dominate liquidity provision by using aggressive limit orders to...

Financial regulations and clientele segmentation explain the proliferation of order types on stock exchanges. Plain market and limit orders lose money, indicating that informed traders use complex orders. Fifty-seven percent of trading volume comes from non-routable orders, which are designed to...

To prevent firms from manipulating prices, U.S. regulators set price ceilings for open-market share repurchases. We find that market structure reforms in the 1990s and 2000s dramatically increased share repurchases because they relaxed constraints that prevent firms from competing with other...

This paper applies the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) to make rolling 1-minute-ahead return forecasts using the entire cross section of lagged returns as candidate predictors. The LASSO increases both out-of-sample fit and forecast-implied Sharpe ratios. And, this...

Big data is revolutionizing the finance industry and has the potential to significantly shape future research in finance. This special issue contains articles following the 2019 NBER/ RFS conference on big data. In this Introduction to the special issue, we define the "Big Data" phenomenon as a...

This paper uses wavelets to decompose each stock's trading-volume variance into frequency-specific components. We find that stocks dominated by short-run fluctuations in trading volume have abnormal returns that are 1% per month higher than otherwise similar stocks where short-run fluctuations...

The theoretical literature has long noted that talent can be used in both the entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial sectors, and its allocation depends on the reward structure. We test these hypotheses by linking administrative college admissions data for 1.8 million individuals with the...

We use administrative registration records with information on the owners of all Chinese firms to document the importance of "connected" investors, defined as state-owned firms or private owners with equity ties with state-owned firms, in the businesses of private owners. We document a hierarchy...

This paper evaluates an approach popularized by McCloskey and Nash (1984) that exploits the fact that grain prices provide information on interest rates. While the grain price approach enables a comparative analysis of capital market development across pre-modern economies and has been applied...

Based on the most comprehensive grain prices available, we employ a storage model to estimate consistent interest rates and compare capital market development in Britain and China. Interest rates for Britain were lower than China's on average by about three percentage points from 1770 to 1860....