This paper considers the growth of dark pools: trading venues for equities without pre-trade transparency. It first documents the emergence and expansion of dark pools in European equity markets in the context of regulatory changes and increased high-frequency trading (HFT). It finds that the...

This thesis contains three papers. Each paper addresses a distinct research question and is implemented on a separate dataset. The first paper concludes that daytime auctions, together with market opening and closing intervals, contribute to the periodicity of the cross-section of stock returns....