Over-the-counter (OTC) markets dominate trading in many asset classes. Will electronic trading displace traditional OTC “voice” trading? Can electronic and voice systems coexist? What types of securities and trades are best suited for electronic trading? We study these issues by focusing on...

This paper develops a structural model of intraday price formation that embodies both information shocks and microstructure effects in an internally consistent, unified setting. The model allows us to better understand the observed intra-day patterns in bid-ask spreads, price volatility,...

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) represent one of the most important financial innovations in decades. An ETF is an investment vehicle that trades intraday and seeks to replicate the performance of a specific index. In recent years ETFs have grown substantially in assets, diversity, and market...

Market microstructure is the area of finance that studies the process by which investors' latent demands are ultimately translated into prices and volumes. This paper provides a detailed review of the theoretical, empirical and experimental literature on market microstructure with a special...

Using data on 1,312 US equity active mutual funds with $3.9 trillion in AUM, we analyze the link between funds' “bottoms up” holdings-based environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) scores and funds' active returns, style factor loadings, and alphas. We find that funds with high ESG...

Actual investment performance reflects the underlying strategy of the portfolio manager and the execution costs incurred in realizing those objectives. Execution costs, especially in illiquid markets, can dramatically reduce the notional return to an investment strategy. This paper examines the...

A crucial question for security markets concerns the impact on liquidity of public display of investors’ latent demands. This topic is central to on-going debates about floor versus automated trading systems, the informational advantages of market makers, and inter-market competition between...