We use the 2016 U.S. SEC tick size pilot to examine the effects of an increase in the minimum price variation on limit order book liquidity in NASDAQ-listed stocks on the NASDAQ exchange. For treatment stocks with an average pre-pilot quoted spread less than $0.05, the tick size increase is...

The U.S. equity markets recently increased the tick size from one to five cents for smaller capitalization stocks. We show that the larger tick size raised the cost for retail-sized liquidity demanding orders by almost fifty percent, and raised profits to liquidity providers by forty percent....

The concept of regulatory systemic risk – a long-term imbalance, resulting from the misalignment between regulatory initiatives and market realities, that impacts multiple areas of the regulatory framework – is developed in the context of US securities regulation. The discussion offers two...

This paper examines the differences between MiFID and Reg NMS and provides, based on market microstructure principles, insights as to their likely impact on European and US securities markets. Although MiFID and Reg NMS share the common objective of enhancing competition in securities markets,...

We analyze a comprehensive sample of more than 10,000 U.S. OTC stocks. We first show that the OTC market is a large, diverse, and dynamic trading environment with a rich set of regulatory and disclosure regimes, comprising venue rules and state laws beyond SEC regulation. We then exploit this...