Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the relation between financial analysts’ ratings of firms’ disclosure policies and the intraday pattern in spreads between specialists’ bid and ask price quotes. Design/methodology/approach – Measure of the disclosure policy is based on...

We find adverse-selection spread components increase sharply in the ratio of trade size to quoted depth, and spike when trade size equals quoted depth. We find that two previously documented and prominent indicators of informed trading, raw trade size and high-trading volume half-hours, offer...

This paper examines the association between block ownership and market liquidity. Blockholders are believed to have access to private, value-relevant information via their roles as monitors of firms' operations. consistent with this, we find that firms with greater blockholder ownership, either...

We find that firms with higher quality disclosures have lower effective bid-ask spreads and lower adverse selection spread components. In contrast, we also find that firms with higher quality disclosures have lower quoted depths, resulting in no unambiguous conclusion regarding market liquidity...

Existing research suggests adverse selection spread components are positively related to trade size, consistent with informed traders trading in larger sizes. However, if market makers use quoted depth to limit losses to informed traders, the size of a trade relative to the depth quoted at the...

We study the relation between disclosure policy and market liquidity. Our tests examine how two key aspects of market liquidity, the effective bid-ask spread and quoted depth, relate to financial analysts' ratings of firms' disclosure policies. We introduce a method of combining order sizes and...