The U.S. corporate bond market underwent a fundamental change with the introduction of TRACE in 2002. Beginning on that date, bond dealers were required to report all trades in publicly-issued corporate bonds to the National Association of Security Dealers, which in turn made transaction data...

Many stock exchanges choose to reduce market transparency by allowing traders to hide some or all of their order size. We study costs and benefits of hidden order usage for a sample of Euronext-Paris stocks, where hidden orders represent 44% of sample order volume. All else equal, hidden orders...

Microstructure noise in security prices biases the results of empirical asset pricing specifications, particularly when security-level explanatory variables are cross-sectionally correlated with the amount of noise. We focus on tests of whether measures of illiquidity, which are likely to be...

We further investigate and provide interpretation for the intriguing Brock, Lakonishok, and LeBaron (1992) finding that simple forms of technical analysis contain significant forecast power for US equity index returns. We document that the forecast ability is partially, but not solely,...

We study trading costs and dealer behavior in U.S. corporate bond markets from 2006 to 2016. Despite a temporary spike during the financial crisis, average trade execution costs have not increased notably over time. However, alternative measures, including dealer capital commitment over various...

We examine the effects of secondary market liquidity on firm value and the decision to conduct an Initial Public Offering (IPO). Competitive liquidity provision can lead to market failure as the IPO either does not occur or the IPO price is discounted to reflect that some welfare-enhancing...

Advocacy for fossil fuel divestment has been growing on college campuses nationwide in recent years. In contrast with prior literature, which focuses on the impact of divestment on returns, I investigate the “frictional” costs that college and university endowments incur in implementing...

It is often asserted that futures investors periodically pay or receive the difference in futures prices across contracts with different delivery dates. This "roll yield" is mythical - no such cash flow occurs, at the time of "roll" trades or on any other date. While the term is a misnomer, the...

Four out of every seven common stocks that have appeared in the CRSP database since 1926 have lifetime buy-and-hold returns less than one-month Treasuries. When stated in terms of lifetime dollar wealth creation, the best-performing four percent of listed companies explain the net gain for the...

While some financial markets increasingly rely on endogenous liquidity provision by ldquo;high frequencyrdquo; traders, others also contract with ldquo;designated market makersrdquo; who commit to provide more liquidity than they would otherwise choose. We identify two reasons that such...