We identify retail brokers that seemingly route orders to maximize order flow payments: selling market orders and sending limit orders to venues paying large liquidity rebates. Angel, Harris, and Spatt (2011) argue that this type of routing may not always be in customers' best interests. For...

We examine the impact of the Global Settlement on affiliation bias in analyst recommendations. Using a broad measure of investment bank-firm relationships, we find a substantial reduction in analyst affiliation bias following the settlement for sanctioned banks. In contrast, we find strong...

For NYSE-listed IPOs, limit order submissions and depth relative to volume are unusually low on the first trading day. Initial buy-side liquidity is higher for IPOs with high quality underwriters, large syndicates, low insider sales, and high pre-market demand, while sell-side liquidity is...

We examine syndicates for 1,638 IPOs from January 1997 through June 2002. We find strong evidence of information production by syndicate members. Offer prices are more likely to be revised in response to information when the syndicate has more underwriters and especially more co-managers. More...

This study analyzes the criteria used to allocate stocks to specialist firms on the NYSE. Non-performance variables play a predominant role in the allocation process, with large specialist firms receiving the majority of new listings. Controlling for size, more-profitable and less-profitable...

We study the effects of alternative halt and reopening procedures on prices, transaction costs, and trading activity for a sample of news-related trading halts on Nasdaq. For intraday halts that reopen after only a five-minute quotation period, inside quoted spreads more than double following...

Using electronic order flow data from November 1997 through February 1998 for a random sample of 100 NYSE stocks, we examine the relative importance of program traders, institutional traders, retail traders, and exchange members in driving commonality in order flow, returns, and liquidity for...

We develop a bid-ask spread estimator from daily high and low prices. Daily high (low) prices are almost always buy (sell) trades. Hence, the high-low ratio reflects both the stock's variance and its bid-ask spread. While the variance component of the high-low ratio is proportional to the return...