Existing theoretical literature suggests that floor trading has discernable benefits over electronic trading. In particular floor relationships lead to a reduction in asymmetric information and hence lower spreads. The ability of floor brokers to participate in incoming order flow without...

We study changes in market quality variables associated with nine modifications to the New York State Securities Transaction Tax (STT) between 1932 and 1981. We find that when there is an increase in the level of an STT, individual stock volatility increases, bid-ask spreads widen, price impacts...

This paper presents a straightforward method for asymptotically removing the well-known upward bias in observed returns of equally-weighted portfolios. Our method removes all of the bias due to any random transient errors such as bid-ask bounce and allows for the estimation of short horizon...

The New York Stock Exchange repealed its Rule 390 on May 8, 2000. The rule disallowed exchange members from trading stocks listed prior to April 26, 1979 outside of an exchange. We examine in this paper some of the implications of the rule's repeal. In particular, we examine changes in market...

We use the American Stock Exchange?s May 1997 market-wide adoption of $1/16 ticks to examine several hypothesis relating to tick size reduction. Specifically, we consider volatility, other aspects of market quality, trader behavior, and specialist profits. The hypothesis that volatility is...

The primary difference between continuous market mechanisms is in the priority rules that they use to match buyers and sellers. In most markets price takes precedence, but if two or more parties are willing to pay the same price, then various markets use different secondary priority rules to...

We examine the impact of three Nasdaq rule changes on some aspects of market quality. In particular we investigate the quotation behavior of market makers following the reduction in tick size from eighths to sixteenths on June 2, 1997; the direct impact of including electronic communication network...