We examine the determinants of the realized bid-ask spread in the U.S. corporate, municipal and government bond markets for the years 1995 to 1997, based on newly available transactions data. Overall, we find that liquidity is an important determinant of the realized bid-ask spread in all three...

Using a carefully constructed matched sample of control (nondecimal) stocks, we isolate the effects of decimalization for a sample of NYSE-listed common stocks trading in decimals. We find that the quoted depth as well as the quoted and effective bid-ask spreads declined significantly following...

Using audit trail data for a sample of NYSE firms, we show that medium size trades are associated with a disproportionately large cumulative stock price change relative to their proportion of all trades and volume. This result is consistent with the predictions of the stealth-trading hypothesis...

In the Chinese stock markets, foreign class B shares trade at an average discount of about 60 percent to the prices at which domestic A shares trade. We develop a simple model, incorporating both asymmetric information and market segmentation, to explain the relative pricing of A shares and B...

We investigate, both theoretically and empirically, the relation between the adverse selection and fixed costs of trading and the number of informed traders in a financial asset. As a proxy for informed traders, we use dual traders---i.e., futures floor traders who execute trades both for their...

We empirically examine how relationships between individual households and their creditors affect the probability of being credit-rationed. Using a data set where the credit rationing of individual households is observed directly, we show that relationship duration and the number of activities...

Prior studies have reported a positive correlation between insider trading and stock price changes. The implication of these studies is that insider (i.e., informed) trades have a differential impact on price discovery than non-insider (i.e., uninformed) trades. Based on these results, various...

We investigate the relation between the number of informed traders in a financial asset and the estimated adverse selection cost of trading in that asset, lambda, after controlling for the effects of previously identified determinants of market liquidity. As a proxy for informed traders, we use...

We develop a multistage model of the loan granting process to understand the contradictory findings of the existing literature on bank-borrower relationships, credit availability, and loan rates. Upon estimating our model with the 1993, 1998, and 2003 versions of the Survey of Small Business...

We take a closer look at the question of whether dual traders in futures markets are indeed informed traders. Underpinning this question is the intuition that a dual trader's decision to trade on his own account is not random, but is endogenously determined by his expectations of trading profits...