We compare popular measures of transaction costs based on daily data with their high-frequency data-based counterparts. We find that for U.S. equities and major foreign exchange rates, (i) the measures based on daily data are highly upward biased and imprecise; (ii) the bias is a function of...

The convention in calculating trading costs in corporate bond markets is to assume that dealers provide liquidity to non-dealers (customers) and calculate average bid-ask spreads that customers pay dealers. We show that customers often provide liquidity in corporate bond markets, and thus,...