The quality of proxy advisors' voting recommendations is important for policymakers and industry participants. We analyze the design of recommendations (available to all market participants) and research reports (available only to subscribers) by a proxy advisor, whose objective is to maximize...

The paper documents important differences in payment for order flow (PFOF), spreads, and price improvement across asset classes. In stocks, we show that PFOF is small. While many retail trades are executed off-exchange, we find that they receive meaningful price improvement, particularly when...