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...

In this paper we show that institutional participation in the U.S. stock market in recent decades has played an ever increasing role in explaining cross-sectional variation in stock market illiquidity. We first document trends in the growth of institutional stock ownership using the 13F...

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...