We identify a new channel ndash; market makers' attention constraints ndash; through which earnings announcements for one stock affect the liquidity of other stocks. When some stocks handled by a designated market maker have earnings announcements, liquidity is lower for non-announcement stocks...

Automation and trading speed are increasingly important aspects of competition among financial markets. Yet we know little about how changing a market's automation and speed affects the cost of immediacy and price discovery, two key dimensions of market quality. At the end of 2006 the New York...

We show that market-maker balance sheet and income statement variables explain time variation in liquidity, suggesting liquidity-supplier financing constraints matter. Using 11 years of NYSE specialist inventory positions and trading revenues, we find that aggregate market level and...

This paper examines liquidity and how it affects the behavior of mutual fund portfolio managers, who account for a significant portion of trading in many assets. We define an asset to be perfectly liquid if a portfolio manager can trade the quantity she desires when she desires at a price not...

Traditional microstructure models predict that market makers' inventory positions do not impact liquidity (the effective cost of trading). Models with limited market maker riskbearing capacity predict that larger inventories negatively impact overall liquidity and the effect is greater for more...

This paper examines whether investors care more about trading their exact quantity demands at some times than at others. Using a new data set of foreign-exchange transactions, I find that customers trade more precise quantities at quarter-end, as evidenced by less trade-size clustering....

We identify a new channel – market makers' attention constraints – through which earnings announcements for one stock affect the liquidity of other stocks. When some stocks handled by a designated market maker have earnings announcements, liquidity is lower for non-announcement stocks...