Regulatory and media concern has focused heavily on the potentially manipulative distortion of market prices associated with naked short selling. However, naked shorting can also have beneficial effects for liquidity and pricing efficiency. We empirically investigate the impact of naked...

Utilizing subsets of trades in which dealers act purely as agents, purely as market-makers, and as both, we decompose dealer spreads in U.S. corporate bond OTC markets into components arising from: 1) dealers' marketmaking role, and 2) their role as agents for their non-dealer customers. We find...

This paper investigates politically connected firms in Germany. With the introduction of a new transparency law in 2007, information on additional income sources for all members of the German parliament became publicly available. We find that members of the conservative party (CDU/CSU) and the...

With the controversial decision in the "Frosta" case, Germany's Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) has made significant changes to the rules that apply to corporate delistings from German stock exchanges. The mandatory approval of the delisting by shareholders and the minority...

We investigate and test hypotheses on how informed trading varies with market-wide factors and the structural and trading characteristics of a firm. We find strong evidence of commonality in informed trading, and a systematic dependence of informed trading on firm characteristics that is largely...

We investigate the association of various firm-specific and market-wide factors with the riskneutral skewness (RNS) implied by the prices of individual stock options. Our analysis covers 149 U.S. firms over a four-year period. Our choice of firms is based on adequate liquidity and trading...

The trading of securities on multiple markets raises the question of each market's share in the discovery of the informationally efficient price. We exploit salient distributional features of multivariate financial price processes to uniquely determine these contributions. Thereby we resolve the...

We examine the impact of iceberg orders on the price and order flow dynamics in limit order books. Iceberg orders allow traders to simultaneously hide a large portion of their order size and signal their interest in trading to the market. We show that when the market learns about iceberg orders...

This paper studies the dynamics of stock market volatility and retail investor attention measured by internet search queries. We find a strong co-movement of stock market indices' realized volatility and the search queries for their names. Furthermore, Granger causality is bi-directional: high...

As of April 23, 2001, the limit order book for stocks listed on Euronext Paris became anonymous. We study the effect of this switch to anonymity on market liquidity and the informational content of the limit order book. Our empirical analysis is based on a model of limit order trading in which...