ABSTRACT This study tests the tax‐induced trading hypothesis as an explanation of the turn‐of‐the‐year anomaly using Canadian and U.S. intraday data. Since the Canadian tax year‐end precedes the calendar year‐end by five business days, tax effects may be isolated. We find the anomaly is related to the degree of seller‐and buyer‐initiated trading and depends upon the incidence of the taxation year‐end. Seller‐initiated transactions (at bid prices) dominate until the tax year‐end after which buyer‐initiated trades (at ask prices) dominate. The anomaly is a function of bid‐ask prices.

This study tests the tax-induced trading hypothesis as an explanation of the turn-of-the-year anomaly using Canadian and U.S. intraday data. Since the Canadian tax year-end precedes the calendar year-end by five business days, tax effects may be isolated. We find the anomaly is related to the degree of seller-and buyer-initiated trading and depends upon the incidence of the taxation year-end. Seller-initiated transactions (at bid prices) dominate until the tax year-end after which buyer-initiated trades (at ask prices) dominate. The anomaly is a function of bid-ask prices.

This paper examines the impact of reducing the tick size on market-making behavior on The Toronto Stock Exchange. The results indicate a significant decrease in the percentage of trades of fewer than 10,000 shares involving the upstairs traders and a significant increase in the percentage of trades of fewer than 1,000 share involving the designated market makers. Consistent with this finding, the upstairs traders earn significantly lower returns on non-block trades and the designated market markers earn lower returns on trades smaller than 1,000 shares. We conclude the tick size reduction benefits the trading public.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers, G20, G24.

This paper examines the costs and determinants of order aggressiveness. Aggressive orders have larger price impacts but smaller opportunity costs than passive orders. Price impacts are amplified by large orders, small firms, and volatile stock prices. To minimize the implementation shortfall, the optimal strategy is to enter buy (sell) orders at the bid (ask). Aggressive buy (sell) orders tend to follow other aggressive buy (sell) orders and occur when bid–ask spreads are narrow and depth on the same (opposite) side of the limit book is large (small). Aggressive buys are more likely than sells to be motivated by information.

We focus on market-making costs by examining the daily bid–ask spreads for off-the-run, one-month Treasury bills around two liquidity-changing events. Event one, Salomon Brothers’ supply shock, results in a roughly 2.5-basis-point increase in the spread because of an increase in ask prices; and event two, the Long-Term Capital Management demand shock, results in a doubling of the spread because of a decrease in bid prices. Our results provide a benchmark for researchers examining bid–ask spreads of securities that include a liquidity premium, a risk premium, and an asymmetric information premium.

The Federal Reserve’s AMLF program was designed to provide liquidity to money market funds (MMFs). Between September 2008 and May 2009, the program made $217 billion in non-recourse loans to depository institutions and bank holding companies to purchase asset-backed commercial paper from MMFs. JP Morgan and State Street dominated the program, accounting for over 90% of all loans made. Our analysis suggests that JP Morgan exhibited more self-dealing behavior than State Street. We find that JP Morgan and State Street earned economically and statistically significant cumulative returns of 2.28% and 2.49% (respectively) over the first seven days of the program after controlling for market returns and heteroscedasticity.

Longstaff [Longstaff, F., 2000. The term structure of very short-term rates: new evidence for the expectations hypothesis. Journal of Financial Economics 58, 397–415] finds support for the expectations hypothesis at the very short end of the repurchase agreement (repo) term structure while other studies find calendar-time-based regularities cause rejection of the expectations hypothesis. Using Longstaff’s methods on a sample of repo rates that pre-dates Longstaff’s sample, we reject the expectations hypothesis for every maturity. The pre-Longstaff-sample repo data comes from a time period where the behavior of short-term interest rates is similar to the long-run average behavior of short-term interest rates. Our results imply that expectations hold when rates are less volatile and/or that we may be entering a period of lower volatility.