The institutional brokerage industry faces an ever-increasing pressure to lower trading costs, which has already driven down average commissions and shifted volume toward low-cost execution venues. However, traditional full-service brokers that bundle execution with services remain a force and...

We examine the effect of high frequency trading on market quality from theperspective of a limit order trader. By competing with slower limit order traders, highfrequency traders (HFT) impose a welfare externality by crowding out slower non-HFTlimit orders. The order book imbalance immediately...

We document that institutional investors, and particularly hedge funds, increased their holdings of smaller stocks from 1980 to 2010 and decreased their holdings of larger stocks. As of 1990 institutions began to underweight, relative to market weights, those stocks that make up the largest 40...