Regulators and some large investors have recently raised concerns about temporary or transitory volatility in highly automated financial markets. It is far from clear that high-frequency trading, fragmentation, and automation are contributing to transitory volatility, but some institutions...

We provide evidence on market structure and the cost of raising capital by examining market structure changes in US equity markets. Only the Nasdaq's Order Handling Rules (OHR), the one reform that reduced institutional trading costs, lowered the cost of raising capital. Using a...

This paper examines the effects of pre-trade opacity on market liquidity in the presence of market fragmentation. In the laboratory, we create a fragmented market by allowing trading on two venues (i.e., limit order books). By varying the features on one of the venues, we study the treatment...

The differences between ECNs and Nasdaq market makers are used to formulate and test several hypotheses about the choice of trading venue and the importance of ECN trades in the price discovery process. Trades are more likely to occur on ECNs when spreads are narrow and when trading volume and...

We compare the execution quality of trades with market makers to trades executed on Electronic Communications Networks (ECNs). Average quoted, realized, and effective spreads are smaller for ECN trades than for market-maker trades even though ECN trades are more informative than trades with...

This paper examines the trading process outside of normal trading hours. Although after-hours trading volume is small, after-hours trades are more informative than trades during the day, and are associated with significant price discovery. Spread-related trading costs are also more than twice as...

Traditional microstructure models predict that market makers' inventory positions do not impact liquidity (the effective cost of trading). Models with limited market maker riskbearing capacity predict that larger inventories negatively impact overall liquidity and the effect is greater for more...

We examine the impact on stock prices of a major upgrade to the New York Stock Exchange's trading environment. The upgrade was sequentially implemented across groups of stocks. The upgrade improved information dissemination on the trading floor and reduced the latency in reporting trades and...

This paper studies the ability of non-informational order imbalances (buy minus sell volume) to predict daily stock returns at the market level. Using a model with three types of participants (an informed trader, liquidity traders, and a finite number of arbitrageurs), we derive predictions...

We use an 11-year panel of daily specialist revenues on individual NYSE stocks to explore the relationship between market-maker revenues and liquidity. If market makers suffer substantial trading losses, lenders may respond by increasing funding costs or reducing credit lines, and market makers...