Market liquidity in the financial crisis: The role of liquidity commonality and flight-to-quality

We examine the dynamics and the drivers of market liquidity during the financial crisis, using a unique volume-weighted spread measure. According to the literature we find that market liquidity is impaired when stock markets decline, implying a positive relation between market and liquidity risk. Moreover, this relationship is the stronger the deeper one digs into the order book. Even more interestingly, this paper sheds further light on so far puzzling features of market liquidity: liquidity commonality and flight-to-quality. We show that liquidity commonality varies over time, increases during market downturns, peaks at major crisis events and becomes weaker the deeper we look into the limit order book. Consistent with recent theoretical models that argue for a spiral effect between the financial sector’s funding liquidity and an asset’s market liquidity, we find that funding liquidity tightness induces an increase in liquidity commonality which then leads to market-wide liquidity dry-ups. Therefore our findings corroborate the view that market liquidity can be a driving force for financial contagion. Finally, we show that there is a positive relationship between credit risk and liquidity risk, i.e., there is a spread between liquidity costs of high and low credit quality stocks, and that in times of increased market uncertainty the impact of credit risk on liquidity risk intensifies. This corroborates the existence of a flight-to-quality or flight-to-liquidity phenomenon also on the stock markets.     

Information,sell-side research,and market making

The interaction between an investment bank's research and market making arms may have important implications for the trading of a firm's stock. We investigate the impact that research has on the liquidity provided by the bank's market maker. Utilizing a large sample of Nasdaq firms, we show that market makers whose banks also provide research coverage provide more liquidity and contribute more to price discovery than do market makers without such research coverage. Finally, we show that such “affiliated” market makers are less affected by uncertainty following earnings announcements. Our results provide new evidence on the sources of liquidity improvements for Nasdaq firms, and suggest that the information produced by banks in the sell-side research process is beneficial to their market makers.     

US presidential elections and implied volatility: The role of political uncertainty

This paper focuses on the effects of political uncertainty and the political process on implied stock market volatility during US presidential election cycles. Using monthly Iowa Electronic Markets data over five elections, we document that stock market uncertainty, as measured by the VIX volatility index, increases along with positive changes in the probability of success of the eventual winner. The association between implied volatility and the election probability of the eventual winner is positive even after controlling for changes in overall election uncertainty. These findings indicate that the presidential election process engenders market anxiety as investors form and revise their expectations regarding future macroeconomic policy.     

The Effect of US Stock Market Uncertainty on Emerging Market Returns

We investigate the effects of US stock market uncertainty (VIX) on the stock returns in Latin America and aggregate emerging markets before, during, and after the financial crisis. We find that increases in VIX lead to significant immediate and delayed declines in emerging market returns in all periods. However, changes in VIX explained a greater percentage of changes in emerging market returns during the financial crisis than in other periods. The higher US stock market uncertainty exerts a much stronger depressing effect on emerging market returns than their own-lagged and regional returns. Our risk transmission model suggests that a heightened US stock market uncertainty lowers emerging market returns by both reducing the mean returns and raising the variance of returns. The VIX fears raise the volatility of emerging market returns through generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH)-type volatility transmission processes.     

Do commodity markets catch a cold from stock markets? Modelling uncertainty spillovers using Google search trends and wavelet coherence

We investigate stock market uncertainty spillovers to commodity markets using wavelet coherence and a general stock market-related Google search trends (GST)-based index to proxy for uncertainty. GST reflect stock market uncertainty over short-, medium- and long-term horizons. Periods of association between GST and the VIX, a widely used proxy for stock market uncertainty, coincide with economic, financial, and geopolitical events. The association between the VIX and GST has grown over time. In line with economic psychology, this implies that during times of heightened uncertainty investors increasingly search for stock market-related information. Our analysis further reveals that some commodities are more susceptible to uncertainty spillovers from stock markets, notably energy commodities. We demonstrate how GST may be used to isolate the impact of specific events and show that COVID-19 had a disproportionate impact on commodity price volatility. We also find that energy, livestock and precious metals are increasingly integrated with stock markets. Spillover analysis repeated using the VIX produces similar results and reflects information that is also reflected in GST, confirming an uncertainty narrative. The use of wavelet analysis and GST to proxy for general and event specific uncertainty offers an alternative perspective to traditional econometric approaches and may be of interest to econometricians, analysts, investors and researchers.     

A tale of two prices: Liquidity and asset prices in multiple markets

This paper investigates the liquidity effect in asset pricing by studying the liquidity–premium relationship of an American depositary receipt (ADR) and its underlying share. Using the [Amihud, Yakov, 2002. Illiquidity and stock returns: cross-section and time series effects. Journal of Financial Markets 5, 31–56] measure, the turnover ratio and trading infrequency as proxies for liquidity, we show that a higher ADR premium is associated with higher ADR liquidity and lower home share liquidity, in terms of changes in these variables. We find that the liquidity effects remain strong after we control for firm size and a number of country characteristics, such as the expected change in the foreign exchange rate, the stock market performance, as well as several variables measuring the openness and transparency of the home market.     

Forecasting global stock market volatilities in an uncertain world

We investigate the predictive relationship between uncertainty and global stock market volatilities from a high-frequency perspective. We show that uncertainty contains information beyond fundamentals (volatility) and strongly affects stock market volatility. Using several crucial uncertainty measures (i.e., uncertainty and implied volatility indices), we prove that the CBOE volatility index (VIX) performs best in point (density) forecasting; the financial stress index (FSI) in directional forecasting. Furthermore, VIX's predictive power improved dramatically after the COVID-19 outbreak, and the VIX-based portfolio strategy enables mean-variance investors to achieve higher returns. There are two empirical properties of VIX: (i) it helps reduce significantly forecast variance rather than bias; and (ii) its forecasts encompass other uncertainty forecasts well. Overall, we highlight the importance of considering uncertainty when exploring the expected stock market volatility.     

Investor Conferences,Firm Visibility,and Stock Liquidity

We examine the influence of investor conferences on firms’ stock liquidity. We find that firms participating in conferences experience a 1.4% to 2.8% increase in stock liquidity compared to nonconference firms. Consistent with investor conferences improving firm visibility, the increase in liquidity is larger for firms with low pre‐conference visibility and varies predictably with conference characteristics that affect the ability of investors to revise their beliefs about the firm. However, for firms with a large investor base and high visibility, conference participation is associated with a decline in stock liquidity, consistent with investor conferences exacerbating the information asymmetry among investors.     

Liquidity and asset pricing: Evidence from the Hong Kong stock market

This study investigates the role of liquidity in pricing stock returns in the Hong Kong stock market. Our results show that liquidity is an important factor for pricing returns in Hong Kong after taking well-documented asset pricing factors into consideration. The results are robust to adding portfolio residuals and higher moment factor in the factor models. The results are also robust to seasonality, and conditional-market tests. We also compare alternative factor models and find that the liquidity four-factor model (market excess return, size, book-to-market ratio, and liquidity) is the best model to explain stock returns in the Hong Kong stock market, while the momentum factor is not found to be priced.     

Is gold the best hedge and a safe haven under changing stock market volatility?

We evaluate the role of gold and other precious metals relative to volatility (Volatility Index (VIX)) as a hedge (negatively correlated with stocks) and safe haven (negatively correlated with stocks in extreme stock market declines) using data from the US stock market. Using daily data from November 1995 to November 2010, we find that gold, unlike other precious metals, serves as a hedge and a weak safe haven for US stock market. However, we find that VIX serves as a very strong hedge and a strong safe haven during our sample period. We also find that in periods of extremely low or high volatility, gold does not have a negative correlation with the US stock market. Our results show that VIX is a superior hedging tool and serves as a better safe haven than gold during our sample period. We highlight the practical significance of our results for financial market participants by conducting a portfolio analysis.     

Liquidity, analysts, and institutional ownership

In this paper, we investigate the empirical relationship between institutional ownership, number of analysts following and stock market liquidity. We find that firms with larger number of financial analysts following have wider spreads, lower market quality index, and larger price impact of trades. However, we find that firms with higher institutional ownership have narrower spreads, higher market quality index, and smaller price impact of trades. In addition, we show that changes in our liquidity measures are significantly related to changes in institutional ownership over time. These results suggest that firms may alleviate information asymmetry and improve stock market liquidity by increasing institutional ownership. Our results are remarkably robust to different measures of liquidity and measures of information asymmetry.     

Risk,uncertainty and monetary policy

The VIX, the stock market option-based implied volatility, strongly co-moves with measures of the monetary policy stance. When decomposing the VIX into two components, a proxy for risk aversion and expected stock market volatility (“uncertainty”), we find that a lax monetary policy decreases both risk aversion and uncertainty, with the former effect being stronger. The result holds in a structural vector autoregressive framework, controlling for business cycle movements and using a variety of identification schemes for the vector autoregression in general and monetary policy shocks in particular. The effect of monetary policy on risk aversion is also apparent in regressions using high frequency data.     

Bank liquidity,the maturity ladder,and regulation

We investigate the liquidity management of 62 Dutch banks between January 2004 and March 2010, when these banks were subject to a liquidity regulation that is very similar to Basel III’s Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR). We find that most banks hold more liquid assets against their stock of liquid liabilities, such as demand deposits, than strictly required under the regulation. More solvent banks hold fewer liquid assets against their stock of liquid liabilities, suggesting an interaction between capital and liquidity buffers. However, this interaction turns out to be weaker during a crisis. Although not required, some banks consider cash flows scheduled beyond 1 month ahead when setting liquidity asset holdings, but they seldom look further ahead than 1 year.     

Money and liquidity in financial markets

We argue that there is a connection between the interbank market for liquidity and the broader financial markets, which has its basis in demand for liquidity by banks. Tightness in the market for liquidity leads banks to engage in what we term “liquidity pull-back,” which involves selling financial assets either by banks directly or by levered investors. Empirical tests on the stock market are supportive. Tighter interbank markets are associated with relatively more volume in more liquid stocks; selling pressure, especially in more liquid stocks; and transitory negative returns. We control for market-wide uncertainty and in the process also contribute to the literature on portfolio rebalancing. Our general point is that money matters in financial markets.     

Stock market liquidity and firm value

This paper investigates the relation between stock liquidity and firm performance. The study shows that firms with liquid stocks have better performance as measured by the firm market-to-book ratio. This result is robust to the inclusion of industry or firm fixed effects, a control for idiosyncratic risk, a control for endogenous liquidity using two-stage least squares, and the use of alternative measures of liquidity. To identify the causal effect of liquidity on firm performance, we study an exogenous shock to liquidity—the decimalization of stock trading—and show that the increase in liquidity around decimalization improves firm performance. The causes of liquidity's beneficial effect are investigated: Liquidity increases the information content of market prices and of performance-sensitive managerial compensation. Finally, momentum trading, analyst coverage, investor overreaction, and the effect of liquidity on discount rates or expected returns do not appear to drive the results.     

Limit Order Book and Commonality in Liquidity

We show that the liquidity provided by an individual stock's limit order book comoves significantly with the market aggregate limit order book liquidity. A closer look at the inside and outside liquidity provided by different parts of limit order book suggests that inside liquidity is mainly influenced by market volatility, while idiosyncratic volatility has a larger impact on outside liquidity. Hence, limit order book inside liquidity exhibits higher commonality than outside liquidity. We also show that the comovement between the stock‐level and market‐aggregate limit order book liquidity measures is related to the commonality in the overall stock market liquidity.     

Does liquidity risk explain low firm performance following seasoned equity offerings?

A seasoned equity offering (SEO) can improve a firm’s stock liquidity and lower its cost of capital. This paper examines whether SEO firms achieve a liquidity gain and the sources of this gain. It explores the role of liquidity risk in explaining SEO long-run performance. The evidence shows that SEO firms experience significant post-issue improvements in liquidity and reductions in liquidity risk. Size and book-to-market matching fails to control for these liquidity effects, generating the low long-term post-SEO performance documented in the literature. After adjusting for liquidity risk, SEO firms show normal long-term performance.     

Foreign Institutional Investment,Ownership, and Liquidity: Real and Informational Frictions

The literature widely documents the negative liquidity impact of foreign participation in firms that permit high foreign institutional ownership. This paper employs a unique setting for the limited participation of qualified foreign institutional investors (QFIIs) in China's A-share market and examines how this impacts on stock liquidity in emerging markets. Contrary to the findings in the literature, foreign investor participation helps enhance the liquidity of affected stocks by promoting trade activities and price discovery. The improvement in liquidity does not occur through the information friction channel, but rather the real friction channel. Our results are robust to endogeneity issue and the possible influence of the global financial crisis, industry effects and the stock exchange. Further, the liquidity improving effects of QFII are even stronger when the analysis is performed on a subsample of QFII firms.     

Convertible bond arbitrage,liquidity externalities,and stock prices

In the context of convertible bond issuance, we examine the impact of arbitrage activity on underlying equity markets. In particular, we use changes in equity short interest following convertible bond issuance to identify convertible bond arbitrage activity and analyze its impact on stock market liquidity and prices for the period 1993 to 2006. There is considerable evidence of arbitrage-induced short selling resulting from issuance. Moreover, we find strong evidence that this activity is systematically related to liquidity improvements in the stock. These results are robust to controlling for the potential endogeneity of arbitrage activity.     

Local ownership as private information: Evidence on the monitoring-liquidity trade-off

We investigate how ownership patterns affect the way the firm is monitored, the liquidity of its shares, and its stock price. We show that informed ownership improves governance and induces value-enhancing decisions (less over-investment and fewer but better acquisitions). At the same time, it increases the adverse selection discount required by less informed investors to trade, reducing the firm's liquidity. Both effects are impounded in the stock price. This explains why ownership seems to be unrelated to performance. Informed investors affect prices in opposite directions: monitoring would raise prices, but the lower liquidity induced by their presence would reduce them.