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Journal of Banking & Finance Vol. 34 No. 10 2010

Liquidity skewness

Richard Roll; Avanidhar Subrahmanyam

University of California, Los Angeles

Abstract

Bid–ask spreads in equities have declined on average but have become increasingly right-skewed. This finding holds across exchanges as well as size, price, and volume quartiles. Higher right-skewness is consistent with more competition among market makers; which may reduce cross-subsidization across periods of high and low asymmetric information, unlike a monopolistic regime that can maintain a relatively constant spread. Confirming this intuition, proportional differences in spreads between earnings announcements and normal periods have increased considerably even as trading costs have declined on average. Skewness also is cross-sectionally related to information proxies such as institutional holdings and analyst following.

DOI
10.1016/j.jbankfin.2010.04.012
Volume
34
Issue
10
Pages
2562-2571
Language
en
Sources
openalex crossref bibtex:phds-export.bib

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