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....

Modern financial markets offer the real world's best approximation to the idealized price auction market envisioned in economic theory. Nevertheless, as the increasingly exquisite and detailed financial data demonstrate, financial markets often fail to behave as they should if trading were truly...

How do option and equity markets interact with each other? This is the central question that is answered from three different angles in this dissertation. The first Chapter discusses how option-implied information is incorporated into equity markets. Based on a novel rescaled option-implied...