The National Association of Security Dealers alleges that professional-trader use of the Small Order Execution System (SOES) causes greater security price volatility. We document bidirectional Granger causality between a proxy for professional SOES trading (the frequency of maximum-sized SOES...

Theory suggests that reputations, developed in repeated face-to-face interactions, allow nonanonymous, floor-based trading venues to attenuate adverse selection in the trading process. We identify instances when stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) experience a non-trivial...

We empirically demonstrate that the opportunities the Boston Stock Exchange and the Cincinnati Stock Exchange offer members to take the other side of their customers' orders through affiliated market makers (to internalize orders) have little short-run effect on posted or effective bid-ask...

In its response to the 1975 Congressional mandate to implement a national market system for financial securities, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) initially exempted the option market. Recent dramatic changes in the structure of the option market prompted the SEC to revisit this...

We use market-order data to determine execution quality on the NYSE, four regional stock exchanges, and the Nasdaq InterMarket. We examine a sample period after the reduction in the minimum price variation and after the SEC imposed new order-handling rules, and analyze dimensions of execution...