Do Liquidity Proxies Based on Daily Prices and Quotes Really Measure Liquidity?

Abstract

This paper examines whether liquidity proxies based on different daily prices and quotes approximate latent liquidity. We compare percent-cost daily liquidity proxies with liquidity benchmarks as well as with realized variance estimates. Both benchmarks and volatility measures are obtained from high-frequency data. Our results show that liquidity proxies based on high-low-open-close prices are more correlated and display higher mutual information with volatility estimates than with liquidity benchmarks. The only percent-cost proxy that indicates higher dependency with liquidity benchmarks than with volatility estimates is the Closing Quoted Spread based on the last bid and ask quotes within a day. We consider different sampling frequencies for calculating realized variance and liquidity benchmarks, and find that our results are robust to it.

Keywords

• liquidity proxy
• liquidity benchmark
• volatility estimate
• correlation coefficient
• partial determination
• mutual information