Given a holomorphic self-map $\varphi $ of $\mathbb {D}$ (the open unit disc in $\mathbb {C}$ ), the composition operator $C_{\varphi } f = f \circ \varphi $ , $f \in H^2(\mathbb {\mathbb {D}})$ , defines a bounded linear operator on the Hardy space $H^2(\mathbb {\mathbb {D}})$ . The model spaces are the backward shift-invariant closed subspaces of $H^2(\mathbb {\mathbb {D}})$ , which are canonically associated with inner functions. In this paper, we study model spaces that are invariant under composition operators. Emphasis is put on finite-dimensional model spaces, affine transformations, and linear fractional transformations.

We show that any weakly separated Bessel system of model spaces in the Hardy space on the unit disc is a Riesz system and we highlight some applications to interpolating sequences of matrices. This will be done without using the recent solution of the Feichtinger conjecture, whose natural generalization to multidimensional model subspaces of ${\mathrm {H}}^2$ turns out to be false.

This note characterizes, in terms of interpolating Blaschke products, the symbols of Hankel operators essentially commuting with all quasicontinuous Toeplitz operators on the Hardy space of the unit circle. It also shows that such symbols do not contain the complex conjugate of any nonconstant singular inner function.

For an inner function u, we discuss the dual operator for the compressed shift $P_u S|_{{\mathcal {K}}_u}$, where ${\mathcal {K}}_u$ is the model space for u. We describe the unitary equivalence/similarity classes for these duals as well as their invariant subspaces.

We discuss the concept of inner function in reproducing kernelHilbert spaces with an orthogonal basis of monomials and examine connections between inner functions and optimal polynomial approximants to ${1}/{f}\;$, where $f$ is a function in the space. We revisit some classical examples from this perspective, and show how a construction of Shapiro and Shields can be modiûed to produce inner functions.

In this paper we discuss the range of a co-analytic Toeplitz operator. These range spaces are closely related to de Branges–Rovnyak spaces (in some cases they are equal as sets). In order to understand its structure, we explore when the range space decomposes into the range of an associated analytic Toeplitz operator and an identifiable orthogonal complement. For certain cases, we compute this orthogonal complement in terms of the kernel of a certain Toeplitz operator on the Hardy space, where we focus on when this kernel is a model space (backward shift invariant subspace). In the spirit of Ahern–Clark, we also discuss the non-tangential boundary behavior in these range spaces. These results give us further insight into the description of the range of a co-analytic Toeplitz operator as well as its orthogonal decomposition. Our Ahern–Clark type results, which are stated in a general abstract setting, will also have applications to related sub-Hardy Hilbert spaces of analytic functions such as the de Branges–Rovnyak spaces and the harmonically weighted Dirichlet spaces.

An asymptotically orthonormal sequence is a sequence that is nearly orthonormal in the sense that it satisfies the Parseval equality up to two constants close to one. In this paper, we explore such sequences formed by normalized reproducing kernels for model spaces and de Branges–Rovnyak spaces.