The Journal of Corporate Finance (JCF) is a highly regarded academic journal specializing in corporate finance. The journal celebrated its silver jubilee year in 2018. We use scientometrics to analyze the journal's impact, prominent topics, most frequent authors, and their affiliated institutions and countries. Using network analysis, we group JCF publications into nine main clusters. Our study depicts the bibliographic couplings of authors and their affiliated institutions and countries, co-citations of journals, and co-occurrences of the authors' specified keywords. Using text mining techniques, we also present the major content of JCF titles, keywords, or abstracts in the form of word clouds.

Using detailed order handling data, we find that institutional brokers who route more orders to affiliated alternative trading systems (ATSs) are associated with lower execution quality (i.e., lower fill rates and higher implementation shortfall costs). To separate clients’ preference for ATSs from brokers’ routing decisions, we confirm these results for orders where brokers have more order handling discretion, matched broker analysis that accounts for ATS usage, matched child orders that account for client intent, and based on an exogenous constraint on ATS venue choice. Our results suggest that increased transparency of order routing practices will improve execution quality.

We show that a new measure of buy-side competition explains momentum profits. The momentum quintile spread is 1.11% when competition is low and negligible when competition is high. Better alphas are attained with superior Sharpe and Sortino ratios, with no negative skewness, and in more investible strategies featuring value-weighted portfolios and large capitalization stocks. Stock characteristics traditionally related to momentum do not explain our results. Tests based on long-term reversals, the trading patterns of funds, their style peers, distant funds, and retail investors suggest that slow information diffusion explains the large momentum spreads and momentum reversals in low competition markets.