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...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>Over-the-counter (OTC) markets dominate trading in many asset classes. Will electronic trading displace traditional OTC “voice” trading? Can electronic and voice systems coexist? What types of securities and trades are best suited for electronic trading? We study these...</p>

We study price pressures, i.e., deviations from the efficient price due to risk-averse intermediaries supplying liquidity to asynchronously arriving investors. Empirically, New York Stock Exchange intermediary data reveals economically large price pressures, 0.49% on average with a half life of...

This paper examines the trading behavior of two groups of liquidity providers (specialists and competing market makers) using a six-year panel of NYSE data. Trades of each group are negatively correlated with contemporaneous price changes. To test for return predictability, we sort stocks into...

The current National Football League overtime rule favors the team starting on offense. Auctioning off or dividing-and-choosing the starting possession can potentially restore ex post fairness. We find auctions to provide a better outcome when teams have asymmetric information.

This paper provides evidence on the benefits of faster proprietary data feeds from stock exchanges over the regulated “public” consolidated data feeds. We measure and compare the National Best Bid and Offer (NBBO) prices in each data feed at the same data center. Price dislocations between...

This paper studies whether high-frequency trading (HFT) increases the execution costs of institutional investors. We use technology upgrades that lower the latency of the London Stock Exchange to obtain variation in the level of HFT over time. Following upgrades, the level of HFT increases....