We survey the growing academic literature using Abel Noser data, including 55 publications thus far. We analyze publication patterns to explore how the availability of a specialized microstructure dataset propagates across different areas within finance and into other disciplines such as accounting. Of note, we identify corporate finance and accounting as the most under-researched areas that offer promising opportunities for future academic research using the data. To provide guidance for researchers interested in using Abel Noser data, we analyze institutional trading using transaction-level data spanning more than 12 years and covering 233 million transactions with $37 trillion traded. We provide background information on the origin and history of the data, offer suggestions for cleaning and using the data, and discuss (dis)advantages of Abel Noser compared to other data sources for institutional trading. We also document two simple facts: 1) institutional trade sizes decline dramatically over time, rendering trade size-based inferences of institutional trades problematic; 2) we estimate that Abel Noser data cover 12% of CRSP volume over our sample period and 15% for 1999–2005, significantly higher than the estimate in Puckett and Yan (2011) for 1999–2005: 8%, a widely quoted number in the literature. This background should prove useful for researchers seeking to address a number of as yet unexplored issues, especially in corporate finance and accounting research.

This study examines whether politicians exhibit hometown favoritism in assigning preferential corporate income tax rates. We find that firms with hometown connections to incumbent provincial leaders experience favorable tax treatment. This effect is more pronounced when those leaders have strong hometown preferences and weaker when they have a strong incentive to seek promotion, suggesting that social incentives are the primary drivers of the effects on corporate tax benefits of hometown favoritism by politicians. Moreover, this effect is intensified when members of senior management have personal connections with the provincial leader. The mechanism test reveals that the provincial governments tend to qualify connected firms for preferential tax policies under their jurisdictions. Overall, our results suggest that hometown favoritism by politicians promotes tax benefits for business entities. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.