We examine empirically the role of high-frequency traders (HFTs) in price discovery and price efficiency. Based on our methodology, we find overall that HFTs facilitate price efficiency by trading in the direction of permanent price changes and in the opposite direction of transitory pricing...

Financial markets face the constant threat of cyber attacks. We develop a principal-agent model of cyber-attacking with fee-paying clients who delegate security decisions to financial platforms. We derive testable implications about clients' vulnerability to cyber attacks and about the fees...

Predatory trading discourages informed investors from gathering information and trading on it. However, using 11 years of equity trading data, we do not find evidence that informed investors are being discouraged. They have roughly constant volumes and profits through the sample. They are...

We test the effects of uncertainty on market liquidity using Hurricane Sandy as a natural experiment. Given the unprecedented strength, scale and nature of the storm, the potential damages of a landfall near the Greater New York area were unpredictable and therefore uncertain. Using a...

This paper investigates the scarcity effects of quantitative easing (QE) policies, drawing on intra-day transaction-level data for German government bonds, purchased under the Public Sector Purchase Program (PSPP) of the ECB/Eurosystem. This paper is the first to match high-frequency QE purchase...

Algorithmic trading has sharply increased over the past decade. Equity market liquidity has improved as well. Are the two trends related? For a recent five-year panel of New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) stocks, we use a normalized measure of electronic message traffic (order submissions,...

We study price pressures in stock prices-price deviations from fundamental value due to a risk-averse intermediary supplying liquidity to asynchronously arriving investors. Empirically, twelve years of daily New York Stock Exchange intermediary data reveal economically large price pressures. A...