The global ETF industry provides more complicated investment vehicles than low-cost index trackers. Instead, we find that the real investments of ETFs may deviate from their benchmarks to leverage informational advantages (which leads to a surprising stock-selection ability) and to help affiliated OEFs through cross-trading. These effects are more prevalent in ETFs domiciled in Europe. Moreover, ETF flows seem to respond to additional risk. These results have important normative implications for consumer protection and financial stability. Received March 18, 2017; Editorial decision October 14, 2018 by Editor Raman Uppal.

We analyze the ability of various market mechanisms to provide liquidity for large equity trades. Using data on 21,077 block transactions in Dow Jones stocks, we find that the “downstairs” NYSE floor market is a significant source of liquidity. Although negotiation in the informal “upstairs” market provides better execution than the downstairs market for large trades, these differences are economically small. We find, however, that upstairs markets are used by traders who can credibly signal that their trades are liquidity motivated. Thus, upstairs markets allow trades that may not otherwise occur.

We examine whether requiring insiders to sell their stock shares based on pre-disclosed plans can mitigate opportunistic insider selling activities and, more importantly, to what extent insiders can circumvent this regulation. Using China's mandate enacted in 2017 as the setting, we demonstrate that a sell-by-plan mandate can reduce opportunistic selling activities. However, insiders can circumvent this mandate by strategically initiating their plans before bad news. We find that this gaming practice is widespread in China. It is concentrated in firms with weak governance but largely absent in firms with strong governance. We also find that China's stock market cannot discern whether a plan is opportunistically motivated upon its announcement. Overall, this paper highlights a new form of opportunism in insider trading—opportunistic planning—and proposes a method to identify such plans. Our results also suggest that government regulation, without strong governance, could be ineffective in curbing corporate executives' opportunistic behaviors.