This paper uses wavelets to decompose each stock's trading-volume variance into frequency-specific components. We find that stocks dominated by short-run fluctuations in trading volume have abnormal returns that are 1% per month higher than otherwise similar stocks where short-run fluctuations...

Big data is revolutionizing the finance industry and has the potential to significantly shape future research in finance. This special issue contains articles following the 2019 NBER/ RFS conference on big data. In this Introduction to the special issue, we define the "Big Data" phenomenon as a...

To prevent firms from manipulating prices, U.S. regulators set price ceilings for open-market share repurchases. We find that market structure reforms in the 1990s and 2000s dramatically increased share repurchases because they relaxed constraints that prevent firms from competing with other...

Financial regulations and clientele segmentation explain the proliferation of order types on stock exchanges. Plain market and limit orders lose money, indicating that informed traders use complex orders. Fifty-seven percent of trading volume comes from non-routable orders, which are designed to...

Independent technological glitches forced two separate trading halts on different U.S. exchanges during the week of July 6, 2015. During each halt, all other exchanges remained open. We exploit exogenous variation provided by this unprecedented coincidence, in conjunction with a proprietary...

Independent technological glitches forced two separate trading halts on different exchanges during the week of July 6, 2015. During each halt, all other exchanges remained open. We exploit exogenous variation provided by this unprecedented coincidence, in conjunction with a novel proprietary...

Security trading now fragments into more than 10 almost identical stock exchanges in the United States. We show that discrete pricing is one economic force that prevents the consolidation of trading volume. The uniform one-cent tick size (minimum price variation), imposed by the SEC's Rule 612,...

Equity markets world-wide have seen a proliferation of trading venues and the consequent fragmentation of order flow. In this paper, we examine how fragmentation of trading is affecting the quality of trading in U.S. markets. We propose using newly-available TRF (trade reporting facilities)...