A recent innovation in equity markets is the introduction of market maker ser-vices paid for by the listed companies themselves. We investigate why firms arewilling to pay a cost to improve the secondary market liquidity of their shares. Weshow that a contributing factor in this decision is the...

We investigate the information content of aggregate stock market liquidity and askwhether it may be a useful realtime indicator, both for nancial stress, and real economicactivity in Norway. We describe the development in a set of liquidity proxies at the OsloStock Exchange (OSE) for the period...

This paper analyzes return patterns and determinants at the Oslo Stock Ex-change (OSE) in the period 1980{2006. We nd that a three-factor model con-taining the market, a size factor and a liquidity factor provides a reasonable t forthe cross-section of Norwegian stock returns. As expected, oil...

We document a strong relation between stock market liquidity and the businesscycle. Stock market liquidity worsens when the economy is slowing down, and thiseffect is most pronounced for small firms. Using data for both the US and Norway,we show that stock market liquidity predicts the current...