A new estimate of transaction costs

Transaction costs are important for a host of empirical analysesfrom market efficiency to international market research. Buttransaction costs estimates are not always available, or whereavailable, are cumbersome to use and expensive to purchase.We present a model that requires only the time series of dailysecurity returns to endogenously estimate the effective transactioncosts for any firm, exchange, or time period. The feature ofthe data that allows for the estimation of transaction costsis the incidence of zero returns. Incorporating zero returnsin the return-generating process, the model provides continuousestimates of average round-trip transaction costs from 1963to 1990 that are 1.2% and 10.3% for large and small decile firms,respectively. These estimates are highly correlated (85%), withthe most commonly used transaction cost estimators.