The effects of regulation on industry structure and trade generation in the US securities industry

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of Regulation FD and the Global Research Analyst Settlement on market share within the US securities industry as well as the determinants of market share during 1996-2004. We find that these regulations did not cause top brokers to lose market share in spite of their reduction of information asymmetries existing within the brokerage industry. They did, however, significantly reduce the quarterly variability in market share changes. We find that Regulation FD and the Global Research Analyst Settlement reduce the importance of an all-star analyst, issuer affiliation, and analyst optimism for gaining brokerage market share. We further discover that the Global Research Analyst Settlement increases the importance of coverage as a market share determinant while reducing the value of analyst experience for non-top brokers. We find that our results remain robust even when we limit our analysis to a set of pure brokerage firms. (c) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.