The Journal of Finance

The Journal of Finance publishes leading research across all the major fields of finance. It is one of the most widely cited journals in academic finance, and in all of economics. Each of the six issues per year reaches over 8,000 academics, finance professionals, libraries, and government and financial institutions around the world. The journal is the official publication of The American Finance Association, the premier academic organization devoted to the study and promotion of knowledge about financial economics.

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Location Matters: An Examination of Trading Profits

Published: 12/17/2002   |   DOI: 10.1111/0022-1082.00396

Harald Hau

The electronic trading system Xetra of the German Security Exchange provides a unique data source on the equity trades of 756 professional traders located in 23 different cities and eight European countries. We explore informational asymmetries across the trader population: Traders located outside Germany in non‐German‐speaking cities show lower proprietary trading profit. Their underperformance is not only statistically significant, it is also of economically significant magnitude and occurs for the 11 largest German blue‐chip stocks. We also examine whether a trader location in Frankfurt as the financial center, or local proximity of the trader to the corporate headquarters of the traded stock, or affiliation with a large financial institution results in superior trading performance. The data provide no evidence for a financial center advantage or of increasing institutional scale economies in proprietary trading. However, we find evidence for an information advantage due to corporate headquarters proximity for high‐frequency (intraday) trading.


FinTech Credit and Entrepreneurial Growth

Published: 08/30/2024   |   DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13384

HARALD HAU, YI HUANG, CHEN LIN, HONGZHE SHAN, ZIXIA SHENG, LAI WEI

Based on automated credit lines to vendors trading on Alibaba's online retail platform and a discontinuity in the credit decision algorithm, we document that a vendor's access to FinTech credit boosts its sales growth, transaction growth, and the level of customer satisfaction gauged by product, service, and consignment ratings. These effects are more pronounced for vendors characterized by greater information asymmetry about their credit risk and less collateral, which reveals the information advantage of FinTech credit over traditional credit technology.