An ability to postpone one's execution without penalty provides an important strategic advantage in high-frequency trading. To elucidate competition between traders one has to formulate to a quantitative theory of formation of the execution price from market expectations and quotes. This theory...

I provide a theoretical model for two empirical phenomena observed in the NYSE and Nasdaq markets. First is the bid-ask bounce recently studied by Heston, Korajczuk and Sadka (HKS, 2008) for high-frequency data. Second is a temporary liquidity squeeze observed by Madureira and Underwood (2008)...

We examine the relative yields of Treasuries and municipals using a generalized model that includes liquidity as a state factor. Using a unique transaction dataset, we are able to estimate the liquidity risk of municipals and its effect on bond yields. We find that a substantial portion of the...

We examine the composition of return volatility, serial correlation, and trading costs before and after decimalization on the New York Stock Exchange. We decompose the variance of price changes into components associated with public news, rounding errors, and market-making frictions. We find...

We report further evidence of the difference in execution costs between Nasdaq and the NYSE before and after the 1997 market reforms. We find that informed trading costs are consistently higher on Nasdaq both before and after the reforms. In the pre-reform period the Nasdaq-NYSE disparity in...

Previous studies have found that common factors explain a high proportion of corporate bond yields. In this paper, we test whether there is a systematic risk premium beyond that implied by a risk-neutral term structure model. We propose a reduced-form term structure model that incorporates both...

In this paper, we investigate the predictability of corporate bond excess returns using a comprehensive data sample for the period from January 1973 to December 2010. We find that corporate bond returns are more predictable than stock returns, and the predictability tends to be higher for...

This paper investigates the roles of illiquidity and credit risk in determining the relations between price volatility of a bond and its trading frequency and trade size based on a large transaction dataset from October 2004 to June 2012. We find a positive relation between volatility and...