We investigate how the increase in speed of U.S. equity markets has distorted liquidity measures. We find that the widely-used Monthly Trade and Quote (MTAQ) database yields a percent effective spread 43% higher than our benchmark, a quoted spread that is nonpositive nine times more often, and a...

We examine a general class of volatility over volume liquidity proxies as computed from low frequency (daily) data. We start from the Kyle and Obizhaeva (2016) hypothesis of transaction cost invariance to identify a new volatility over volume liquidity proxy “VoV(%Spread)” for percent spread...

Using a large transaction level dataset, we find that institutional investors can make economically insignificant -4 to 9 basis points net profit on their marked-to-market portfolio of buy – sell transactions over 1-day to 4-week holding period. The negative net marked-to-market profit comes...

Are portfolio managers skilled or do they trade too much? Using a marked-to-market based“fair-value” method for measuring fund manager skill, we find that institutional managers canpotentially earn +42 (+33) basis points benchmark-adjusted return before transaction costs aftera holding...