We assess the quality of opening and closing prices for Nasdaq stocks by examining the effect that opening and closing call auctions (introduced in 2004) have had on price formation. Our use of measurement intervals of one minute or less sharpens the picture of intra-day volatility...

We extend the literature on the effects of managerial entrenchment on capital structure to consider how safety-net subsidies and financial distress costs interact with managerial incentives to influence capital structure in U.S. commercial banking. Using cross-sectional data on publicly traded,...

Bank consolidation is a global phenomenon. It may enhance the value of firms in the industry if, for example, it is driven by scale and scope economies, but skeptics often accuse bankers of sacrificing value to build empires. Using data on bank holding companies in the U.S., we find strong...

We extend the literature on the effects of managerial entrenchment to consider how safety-net subsidies and financial distress costs interact with managerial incentives to influence capital structure in U.S. commercial banking. Using cross-sectional data on publicly traded, highest-level U.S....

In this paper, we infer motives for trade initiation from market sidedness. We define trading as more two-sided (one-sided) if the correlation between the numbers of buyerand seller-initiated trades increases (decreases), and assess changes in sidedness (relative to a control sample) around...

We show that equity markets are typically two-sided and that trades cluster in certain trading intervals for both NYSE and Nasdaq stocks under a broad range of conditions-news and non-news days, different times of the day, and a spectrum of trade sizes. By “two-sided” we mean that the...