The field of academic finance has grown and evolved in the 47 years since the Journal of Financial Economics (JFE) began publishing papers. This paper examines detailed data on the 3,003 papers written by 3,358 different authors published in the JFE over the period 1974–2020. Advances in computing power and electronic communication have driven trends toward more empirical work, more coauthorship, and more complex papers. The set of authors, referees, and editors has also evolved as the field spans a much larger geographic footprint and as women have come to play a larger role in all aspects of academic finance. Growth in the demand for finance faculty has driven up faculty compensation and the demand for scarce journal space.

This special issue of the Journal of Financial Economics includes six articles that analyze the market microstructure of Nasdaq in various ways. The question of the costs of trading on Nasdaq has become contentious in both the academic and legal/regulatory arenas since the Christie and Schultz (1994) article first noted that many actively traded Nasdaq stocks were almost never quoted on odd eights. The articles in this symposium bring new and interesting insights to this debate.

This paper studies the relation between the premiums in takeover bids involving exchange-listed target firms from 1975-91 and the pre-announcement stock price runups. The evidence shows that the pre-bid runup and the post-announcement increase in the target's stock price (the ‘markup’) are generally uncorrelated. With little substitution between the runup and the markup, the runup is an added cost to the bidder. This finding has important implications for assessing the costs of insider trading. It also raises interesting questions about the role of information from public capital markets in private takeover negotiations.

Data for the 516 papers published in volumes 1–30 of the Journal of Financial Economics in the period 1974–91 are analyzed. 477 authors from 136 institutions contributed papers, and these papers received 16,231 citations according to the Social Science Citation Index. Lists of authors and institutions who have contributed the most papers to the JFE and a list of the mostly highly-cited JFE papers show why the Journal has been successful in influencing the finance and economics literature during its first 18 years.

Stock exchange seats are important assets for securities brokers since they provide access to centralized secondary trading markets for corporate securities at a reduced cost. This paper provides empirical evidence on the dynamic behavior of monthly New York and American Stock Exchange seat prices over the 1926–1972 period. Specifically, evidence is presented which: (a) is consistent with a multiplicative random walk model for seat prices; (b) indicates that unexpected changes in the prices of exchange-listed stocks or in the volume of shares traded on the exchange are important new information about the value of seats in each month; and (c) indicates that the market for seats is efficient in assimilating new information and quickly incorporates new information into the prices of seats. In addition, we examine the effect of the infrequent trading of seats on the statistical properties of the models.

This article analyzes the behavior of stock return volatility using daily data from 1885 through 1988. The October 1987 stock market crash was unusual in many ways. October 19 was the largest percentage change in market value in over 29,000 days. Stock volatility jumped dramatically during and after the crash. Nevertheless, it returned to lower, more normal levels more quickly than past experience predicted. I use data on implied volatilities from call option prices and estimates of volatility from futures contracts on stock indexes to confirm this result.

[This article analyzes the behavior of stock return volatility using daily data from 1885 through 1988. The October 1987 stock market crash was unusual in many ways. October 19 was the largest percentage change in market value in over 29,000 days. Stock volatility jumped dramatically during and after the crash. Nevertheless, it returned to lower, more normal levels more quickly than past experience predicted. I use data on implied volatilities from call option prices and estimates of volatility from futures contracts on stock indexes to confirm this result.]

This paper examines whether hostile takeovers can be distinguished from friendly takeovers, empirically, based on accounting and stock performance data. Much has been made of this distinction in both the popular and the academic literature, where gains from hostile takeovers result from replacing incumbent managers and gains from friendly takeovers result from strategic synergies. Alternatively, hostility could reflect strategic choices made by the bidder or the target. Empirical tests show that most deals described as hostile in the press are not distinguishable from friendly deals in economic terms, except that hostile transactions involve publicity as part of the bargaining process.