Automation and trading speed are increasingly important aspects of competition among financial markets. Yet we know little about how changing a market's automation and speed affects the cost of immediacy and price discovery, two key dimensions of market quality. At the end of 2006 the New York...

Using a database of daily institutional trades, we document that a majority of short-term institutional trades lose money. In aggregate, over 23% of round-trip trades are held for less than three months, and the returns on these trades average -3.91% (non-annualized). These losses are pervasive...

We use a proprietary dataset to test the implications of several asymmetric information models on how short-lived private information affects trading strategies and liquidity provision. Our identification rests on information acquisition before analyst recommendations are publically announced....

We show short selling in corporate bonds forecasts future bond returns. Short selling predicts bond returns where private information is more likely, in high-yield bonds, particularly after Lehman's collapse. Short selling predicts returns following both high and low past bond returns. This,...

We study price pressures, i.e., deviations from the efficient price due to risk-averse intermediaries supplying liquidity to asynchronously arriving investors. Empirically, New York Stock Exchange intermediary data reveals economically large price pressures, 0.49% on average with a half life of...

We identify long-lived pricing errors through a model in which inattentive investors arrive stochastically to trade. The model’s parameters are structurally estimated using daily NYSE market-maker inventories, retail order flows, and prices. The estimated model fits empirical variances,...