The folk wisdom is that competition reduces agency costs. We provide indirect empirical support for this view. We argue that the temptation to retain cash and engage in less productive activities is more severe for firms in less competitive industries. Hence an unanticipated increase in...

I show that frequent batch auctions for stocks have the potential to reduce the severity of stock price crashes when they occur. For a given sequence of orders from a continuous electronic limit order book market, matching orders using one second apart batch auctions results in nearly the same...