Whether proprietary traders provide or take liquidity, and how their behavior evolves over the business cycle and across stocks, remains at the center of an ongoing debate. Using a unique dataset from the NYSE, we document that proprietary traders concentrate their trades in large and liquid...

A stream of literature shows that human attention constraints affect asset pricing in predictable ways. When traders are distracted, stock prices tend to initially underreact to earnings news and then gradually incorporate the news over subsequent weeks. In modern markets, however, the majority...

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 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,...