We examine the impact deciding to route limit orders away from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has on three dimensions of execution quality with methodologies controlling for market conditions and order submission strategies. Overall differences in limit order execution quality between regional stock exchanges and the NYSE are small, suggesting that the order routing decision may not affect retail limit order traders substantively. Conditioning on the distance between the limit order's price and prevailing quotes, however, reveals systematic differences in execution quality. This implies that brokers can strategically route limit orders to improve retail limit order execution quality.

In cost accounting many of the biggest problems occur in the overhead element. One of the frequently posed overhead problems rise in consolidating substantial error in the absorption rate due to a volume change in operations. The usual text treatment leaves past operations uncorrected, simply alters the absorption rate to a new incorrect figure. This lets the error in the months of operation prior to the recognition of a need for some adjustment. A type of graphical analysis might be utilized as a simple but effective tool to clearly demonstrate the respective alternatives of either making an adjustment in the accounts and using a corrected rate or allowing the old figures to stand and simply routing your overhead application rate to a new basis designed to offset the past error by a counterbalancing error over the remaining financial period. However, graphical analysis vividly demonstrates the difference in the effect of the alternatives on absorbed cost during the planned production period.

We empirically demonstrate that the opportunities the Boston Stock Exchange and the Cincinnati Stock Exchange offer members to take the other side of their customers’ orders through affiliated market makers (to internalize orders) have little short-run effect on posted or effective bid-ask spreads. This is true despite substantial movement of order flow away from the New York Stock Exchange when trading under one of these regional stock exchange programs begins. These results contrast with the adverse effects of market fragmentation and internalization predicted by some theoretical market microstructure analyses and the popular financial press.

Technical analysis, or the use of past prices to infer private information, has value in a model in which prices are not fully revealing and traders have rational conjectures about the relation between prices and signals. A two-period dynamic model of equilibrium is used to demonstrate that rational investors use historical prices in forming their demands and to illustrate the sensitivity of the value of technical analysis to changes in the values of the exogenous parameters.

This paper employs a new approach to study the effects of option trading on the behavior of underlying stock prices. Extant research compares distributional properties of the stock price at two points in time divided by an event in the option market that might affect price behavior. As an alternative, we examine the stock price adjustment to the release of quarterly earnings using samples of firms with and without listed options. We find the two samples exhibit different adjustment processes, with the nonoption firms requiring substantially more time to adjust.