This paper studies the f lows of funds into and out of equity mutual funds. Consumers base their fund purchase decisions on prior performance information, but do so asymmetrically, investing disproportionately more in funds that performed very well the prior period. Search costs seem to be an important determinant of fund f lows. High performance appears to be most salient for funds that exert higher marketing effort, as measured by higher fees. Flows are directly related to the size of the fund's complex as well as the current media attention received by the fund, which lower consumers' search costs.ALTHOUGH MUCH ACADEMIC RESEARCH on mutual funds addresses issues of performance measurement and attribution, we can learn more from this industry than whether fund managers can consistently earn risk-adjusted excess returns. Researchers studying funds have shed light on how incentives affect fund managers' behavior, 1 how board structure affects oversight activities, 2 and how scale and scope economies affect mutual fund costs and fees. 3 More generally, the fund industry is a laboratory in which to study the actions of individual investors who buy fund shares. In this paper, we study the f lows of funds into and out of individual U.S. equity mutual funds to better understand the behavior of households that buy funds and the fund complexes and marketers that sell them.

This article reports the results of an experiment designed to assess the impact of last-sale trade reporting on the liquidity of BBB corporate bonds. Overall, adding transparency has either a neutral or a positive effect on liquidity. Increased transparency is not associated with greater trading volume. Except for very large trades, spreads on newly transparent bonds decline relative to bonds that experience no transparency change. However, we find no effect on spreads for very infrequently traded bonds. The observed decrease in transaction costs is consistent with investors' ability to negotiate better terms of trade once they have access to broader bond-pricing data. (JEL codes: G14, G18, G23, G24, G28) Although larger than the market for US Government or municipal bonds, the corporate bond market historically has been one of the least transparent securities markets in the United States, with neither pretrade nor posttrade transparency. Corporate bonds trade primarily over-the-counter , and until recently, no centralized mechanism existed to collect and disseminate posttransaction information. This structure changed on July 1, 2002, when the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) began a program of increased posttrade transparency for corporate bonds, known as the Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine (TRACE) system. As part of this structural change, only a selected subset of bonds initially was subject to public dissemination of trade information. The resulting experiment enables us to observe the effects of increased posttrade transparency on market liquidity in a controlled setting.

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We use order data to assess the accuracy of execution cost estimation with trade and quote data. For our sample, estimates of the effective spread overstate actual execution costs by up to 17%. The biases result from errors in the inference of the trade direction and errors in the assignment of the benchmark quote. We find the accuracy of two popular trade direction algorithms improve marginally when trades are not lagged 5 seconds.

Trading by corporate insiders and their tippees is analyzed in Anheuser‐Busch's 1982 tender offer for Campbell Taggart. Court records that identify insider transactions are used to disentangle the individual insider trades from liquidity trades. Consistent with previous studies, insider trading was found to have had a significant impact on the price' of Campbell Taggart. However, the impact of informed trading on the market is complicated. Trading volume net of insider purchases rose. Contrary to the broad implications of adverse selection models, Campbell Taggart's liquidity improved when the insiders were active in the market, and the insiders received superior execution for their orders.

We provide empirical evidence on order submission strategy of investors with similar commitments to trade by comparing the execution costs of market orders and marketable limit orders (i.e., limit orders with the same trading priority as market orders). The results indicate the unconditional trading costs of marketable limit orders are significantly greater than market orders. We attribute the difference in costs to a selection bias and provide evidence suggesting the order submission strategy decision is based on prevailing market conditions and stock characteristics. After correcting for the selection bias, the results show the average trader chooses the order type with lower conditional trading costs.

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