Dealers in over-the-counter securities form networks to mitigate search frictions. The audit trail for municipal bonds shows the dealer network has a core-periphery structure. Central dealers are more efficient at matching buyers and sellers than peripheral dealers, which shortens intermediation...

When brokers, analysts and fund managers buy or sell for their own account, they outperform retail investors over short windows up to a month. They earn particularly high abnormal returns when they trade simultaneously with other financial experts and when they trade before earnings...

Equity research analysts tend to cover firms about which they have favorable views. We exploit this tendency to infer analysts' preferences for corporate policies from their coverage decisions. We then use exogenous analyst disappearances to examine the effect of these preferences on corporate...