Why do brokers charge per-share commissions to institutional traders? What determines the commission charge? We examine commissions and order flow for a sample of institutional orders and find that most per-share commissions are concentrated at only a few price points, primarily 5 and 6 cents...

Modern physics has demonstrated that matter behaves very differently as it approaches the speed of light. This paper explores the implications of modern physics to the operation and regulation of financial markets. Information cannot move faster than the speed of light. The geographic separation...

This paper provides evidence on the benefits of faster proprietary data feeds from stock exchanges over the regulated “public” consolidated data feeds. We measure and compare the National Best Bid and Offer (NBBO) prices in each data feed at the same data center. Price dislocations between...

We survey empirical studies on the development and effects of increased computerization across equity, foreign exchange, derivatives, and fixed-income markets. While the changes in the trading process due to computerization in less liquid markets such as the corporate bond market have been...

This paper studies whether high-frequency trading (HFT) increases the execution costs of institutional investors. We use technology upgrades that lower the latency of the London Stock Exchange to obtain variation in the level of HFT over time. Following upgrades, the level of HFT increases....

High-frequency trading has led to widespread efforts to reduce information propagation delays between physically distant exchanges. Using relativistically correct millisecond-resolution tick data, we document a three millisecond decrease in one-way communication time between the Chicago and New...