The evidence on institutional investors' trading behavior during the 1990s is broadly consistent with those investors seeking to reduce execution costs. Specifically, institutional investors break up large orders into smaller trades; the nature of the break-up depends in part on characteristics...

Using proprietary data, we examine institutional orders and trades filled by alternative electronic trading systems. Our data consist of almost 800,000 orders (corresponding to 2.15 million trades) worth approximately $1.6 trillion, between the first quarter of 1996 and the first quarter of...

In this paper, we use a single unifying framework to analyze the sources of profits to a wide spectrum of return-based trading strategies implemented in the literature. We show that less than 50 percent of the 120 strategies implemented in the paper yield statistically significant profits and,...

This paper examines changes in spread, trading activity and market-maker competition around acquisition announcements involving NASDAQ targets. We find a significant increase in spread immediately preceding the announcement, consistent with an increase in adverse selection costs. Targets with...

We analyze the impact of the introduction of credit default swaps (CDS) on real decision making within the firm and the influence of firms' local economic and legal environments on that impact. We extend the model of Bolton and Oehmke (2011) to take into account uncertainty about whether the...