Regulators have expressed concern that the growing number of financial restatements, especially since the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), confuse investors and erode confidence in the capital markets. Given the investor protection goal of SOX, of particular concern is the...

The competing risks technique is applied to the analysis of times to execution and cancellation of limit orders submitted on an electronic trading platform. Time-to-execution is found to be more sensitive to the limit price variation than time-to-cancellation, even though it is less sensitive to...

I examine strategic behavior amongst dealers in the NASDAQ market to identify whether they infer information from order flow. In particular, I ask: (a) is there a lead quote-setting dealer in each security and if so, are the quotes and/or trades of this leader informative?, (b) do others making...

We examine the effect of tick size on quotation behavior in a naturally-controlled experimental setting. Of the top six Electronic Communications Networks (ECNs), three allow sub-penny quotes (group S) and three do not (group P). For a sample of stocks that trade on all six of these ECNs, we...

Research on the association between abnormal audit fees (measuring audit effort) and financial misconduct has produced mixed results. The use of actual misstatements in this research creates small-sample inferences, introduces systematic selection bias, and reduces the scope of sample coverage....

In November 2011, the SEC implemented the final provision of Rule 15c3-5 curbing unfiltered market access. The provision mandated that brokers verify their clients' order flow for compliance with credit and capital thresholds before routing to market centers. We find that the new checks...

Managers with higher risk incentives (greater options vega) issue less readable disclosures. Those in the top-quartile of vega file annual reports that are about 15.4% more voluminous than the filings of bottom-quartile-vega managers. The effect of vega on obfuscation remains after controlling...

We document stylized facts about very short-lived - fleeting - orders submitted to a limit order trading platform, and study the dynamics of fleeting order activity. Principal component analysis for the probabilities of limit order cancellation shows that most of the cross-sectional variation in...