Effects Of Illiquidity Research Articles

The effect of illiquidity, risk, beta and firm size towards stock returns: ASEAN stock exchanges

The effect of illiquidity, risk, beta and firm size towards stock returns: ASEAN stock exchanges

Pricing the Illiquidity Premium for Private Market Assets

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of illiquidity on the value of assets using an options approach. The paper uses two experiments (Hydropower & Damodaran data) to determine the illiquidity. Evidence suggests that erroneous assumptions of the illiquidity premium priced into an asset may ultimately misrepresent an investments value and the risk-return profile. Determining a liquidity standard and an appropriate independent measurement of illiquidity premiums are compared using common yet varying illiquidity pricing theories. Current insights and illiquidity impacts through measurement practices being followed by asset managers are assessed using data of highly illiquid private market assets. Experimental analysis of illiquidity pricing theories are measured against common industry practices of private market assets to reveal inaccuracies in illiquidity premiums. In this paper, the researcher has conducted two sets of experiments to determine the illiquidity premium. Results of the study conclude that the current illiquidity premium being paid to the investors are substantially below the premium that we find using an options approach.

Investor Sentiment and Market-Wide Liquidity Pricing

The recent asset pricing evidence on the return-liquidity risk relationship is mixed and somewhat ambiguous. We reevaluate the importance of market-wide liquidity and liquidity risk for equity pricing by taking the role of investor sentiment into account. Regarding the market-wide liquidity level as a systematic factor, we find that high market sentiment tends to weaken the effect of market-wide illiquidity - both expected and unexpected - on stocks returns. With respect to systematic liquidity exposure as a priced risk factor, the results show that the effect of exposure to shocks in aggregate liquidity on expected returns is significantly positive when sentiment is low, while it is significantly negative when sentiment is high suggesting that “rational” asset pricing is only valid in the low sentiment regime without too much turbulence caused by sentiment traders.

Moderating Effect of Illiquidity on The Relationship Between Momentum and Equity Returns in The Kenyan Capital Markets

This paper sought to examine the moderating effect of illiquidity on the relationship between momentum and equity returns in the Kenyan capital markets. Previous studies have shown that illiquidity has a time-varying effect on momentum strategies, but little is known whether illiquidity has a moderating effect on the relationship between momentum and equity returns in Kenyan capital markets. A longitudinal research design was used for this study to examine the causal inference. Data comprised of monthly transactions on the 20 equities used in the formulation of the NSE 20 share index over the period between Jan 2009 and up to March 2018 which formed 111 data points. ADF and PP results showed that Returns and momentum are stationary at levels while illiquidity was stationary at first difference. The error correction term was negative and statistically significant with or without the moderator. Results indicate that without a moderator percentage increase in momentum is linked to a 0.0000313% increase in returns in the short run. The study further shows that the effect of momentum on equity returns is moderated by illiquidity using a t-test. R2 changed from 0.427 to 0.4337 indicating a change of 0.006 at 0.05% significant level suggesting that illiquidity moderates the relationship between momentum and equity returns in the Kenyan capital markets.

Investigating the effects of illiquidity on credit risks via new liquidity augmented stochastic volatility jump diffusion model

Liquidity is extremely important not only within the context of financial markets but also in every scale of economic transactions. In this study, within the realm of financial markets, we configure liquidity as an independent stochastic process moderating the fluidity of all transactions and hence dynamically changing asset values. This study’s asset value process ignoring liquidity is modelled with a stochastic volatility jump-diffusion () model and that model is augmented with the incorporation of a liquidity process. The new model is called liquidity augmented stochastic volatility jump-diffusion () model. The simulation results suggest that model outperforms the models without liquidity. The application of model on the estimation of probabilities of default and credit risk spreads, using actual financial data of the selected companies listed in Dow Jones 30, reveals that neglecting the liquidity dimension in asset valuation might lead to inefficient assessments of risks. The models without an illiquidity process underestimate the probabilities of default and credit spread risks in comparison to the liquidity augmented model, model, and we believe this might have accounted for the ignored risks that caused the 2007–2008 financial crisis in a great degree.

The effects of transaction costs and illiquidity on the prices of volatility derivatives

The prices of assets differ when considering transaction costs and their illiquidity, thus affecting their returns. As volatility derivatives such as variance swaps, gamma swaps, corridor variance swaps and volatility swaps depend on the expected values of these returns, we develop a high-order algorithm so that differences in the fair values of the volatility derivatives under different transaction costs and illiquidity models can be precisely observed. A high-order finite-difference algorithm is used to solve a framework of partial differential equations. A local mesh refinement strategy is applied at the singularities that appear in the pricing problem of some volatility derivatives so that nonuniform five-point stencil finite differences can be implemented in space. The time-stepping is dealt with by an efficient iterative scheme coupled with a Richardson extrapolation and Carathéodory–Fejér approximations. Consequently, the highly convergent solutions are used to analyze the effect of transaction costs and illiquidity on the fair values of volatility derivatives, and the results demonstrate an increase in these values when different transaction costs and liquidity models are implemented.

The Importance of Investor Heterogeneity: An Examination of the Corporate Bond Market

Corporate bond market participants are increasingly worried about liquidity. However, bid-ask spreads and other standard measures indicate liquidity has not deteriorated significantly. This paper proposes a potential reconciliation. We show the sensitivity of credit yields to bid-ask spreads increased fourfold from 2005 to 2019. We then provide a model that connects this change to the rapid growth of mutual funds in the corporate bond market. The model features heterogeneous investors with different trading needs who choose between a risk-free asset and illiquid bonds. As the risk-free rate declines, more short-term investors reach for yield and enter the bond market. These short-term investors reduce the selling pressure in each sub-market and so the bid-ask spreads. However, their greater trading needs amplify the sensitivity of credit yields to the bid-ask spreads, leading to a larger liquidity component. We next test the model’s predictions using detailed data on investor holdings in the U.S. As predicted, we find investor turnover is associated with larger effects of illiquidity on credit yields. Bonds with more short-term investors are traded at lower bid-ask spreads, but their credit yields are more sensitive to the bid-ask spreads. Finally, we look across countries and show that, consistent with the model, larger declines in risk-free rates are associated with higher growth in mutual fund shares. These results highlight the key role that investor heterogeneity plays in determining how liquidity is priced into corporate bond yields and firms’ financing conditions.

Investigating the Effects of Illiquidity on Credit Risks via New Liquidity Augmented Stochastic Volatility Jump Diffusion Model

Investigating the Effects of Illiquidity on Credit Risks via New Liquidity Augmented Stochastic Volatility Jump Diffusion Model

Corporate Bond Illiquidity and Bond Return Synchronicity

This paper provides an innovative theoretical model and empirical evidence for how the illiquidity of corporate bonds, as trading noise, dampens firm-specific information incorporated into bond prices. We find a negative relation between bond illiquidity and synchronicity, and this empirical relation remains after applying robustness checks and endogeneity controls. Consistent with theoretical model implications, the effect of bond illiquidity as information friction is more pronounced for bonds with lower market sensitivity and for firms with higher degrees of information uncertainty and operating in weaker information environments. We also explore general bond return synchronicity determinants, including both bond attributes and firm fundamentals.

Walking a Tightrope: Using Financial Diaries to Investigate Day-to-Day Financial Decisions and the Social Safety Net of the Financially Excluded

Financially vulnerable, low-income individuals are more likely to experience financial exclusion as they are unable to access financial services that meet their needs. How do they cope with economic instability, and what is the role of social networks in their coping strategies? Using financial diaries, we explore the day-to-day monetary transactions (n = 16,889) of forty-five low-to-moderate income individuals with restricted access to mainstream lending in Glasgow, UK, over a six-month period. Our sample includes users of microcredit and financial advice, as well as nonusers of these services. Findings reveal that informal lending to avoid the pernicious effects of short-term illiquidity was pervasive among these individuals. However, taking informal loans often strains valuable social capital and keeps people from building up a formal credit footprint. Our findings suggest that financially vulnerable populations would benefit from policies that focus on alternative financial mechanisms to help stabilize income-insecure individuals in the short-term.

Fire-sale acquisitions and intra-industry contagion

This paper presents empirical evidence on the combined effects of target firm distress and industry-level illiquidity on acquisition outcomes and industry-specific contagion. When the target industry is in distress, I find that the fire-sale effects cause distressed targets to be sold to industry outsiders at discounts and acquirers to gain higher return by exploiting targets weakened bargaining power. These findings are stronger for targets with high industry asset-specificity in capital, labor and technology. I also find that target rivals earn negative abnormal stock return due to negative information from fire-sale acquisitions.

Illiquidity and Stock Returns II: Cross-Section and Time-Series Effects

New tests are presented on the effects of stock illiquidity on stock return. Over time, expected market illiquidity positively affects ex ante stock excess return (usually called â¬Srisk premiumâ¬?). This complements the positive cross-sectional return-illiquidity relationship. The illiquidity measure here is the average daily ratio of absolute stock return to dollar volume, which is easily obtained from daily stock data for long time series in most stock markets. Illiquidity affects more strongly small firms stocks, suggesting an explanation for the changes â¬Ssmall firm effectâ¬? over time. The impact of market illiquidity on stock excess return suggests the existence of illiquidity premium and helps explain the equity premium puzzle.

Option pricing for a large trader with price impact and liquidity costs

This paper concerns the pricing of options for a large trader in a market with liquidity risk. The investor's trading action is assumed to have some lasting impact on the underlying asset, and the effect of illiquidity is modeled via trading speed (rate of change in holdings). For such a large trader, liquidity risk is quite important since the permanent price impact as well as liquidity costs incurred during trading must be taken into account. The utility maximization approach to determine option prices leads to optimal control problems. This paper shows that the value functions of these optimal control problems are the unique viscosity solutions of a fully nonlinear second-order PDE. Moreover, some illustrative examples with explicit optimal solutions and numerical results are presented.

The role of liquidity in asset pricing: the special case of the Portuguese Stock Market

Purpose The aim of this paper is to examine the role of liquidity in asset pricing in a tiny market, such as the Portuguese. The unique setting of the Lisbon Stock Exchange with regards to changes in classification from an emerging to a developed stock market, allows an original answer to whether changes in the development of the market affect the role of liquidity in asset pricing. Design/methodology/approach The authors propose and compare two alternative implications of liquidity in asset pricing: as a desirable characteristic of stocks and as a source of systematic risk. In contrast to prior research for major stock markets, they use the proportion of zero returns which is an appropriated measure of liquidity in tiny markets and propose the separated effects of illiquidity in a capital asset pricing model framework over the whole sample period as well as in two sub-samples, depending on the change in classification of the Portuguese market, from an emerging to a developed one. Findings The overall results of the study show that individual illiquidity affects Portuguese stock returns. However, in contrast to previous evidence from other markets, they show that the most traded stocks (hence the most liquid stocks) exhibit larger returns. In addition, they show that the illiquidity effects on stock returns were higher and more significant in the period from January 1988 to November 1997, during which the Portuguese stock market was still an emerging market. Research limitations/implications These findings are relevant for investors when they make their investment decisions and for market regulators because they reflect the need of improving the competitiveness of the Portuguese stock market. Additionally, these findings are a challenge for academics because they exhibit the need for providing alternative theories for tiny markets such as the Portuguese one. Practical implications The results have important implications for individual and institutional investors who can take into account the peculiar effect of liquidity in stock returns to make proper investment decision. Originality/value The Portuguese market provides a natural experimental area to analyse the role of liquidity in asset pricing, because it is a tiny market and during the period studied it changed from an emerging to a developed stock market. Moreover, the authors have to highlight that previous evidence almost exclusively focuses on the US and major European stock markets, whereas studies for the Portuguese one are scarce. In this context, the study provides an alternative methodological approach with results that differ from those theoretically expected. Thus, these findings are a challenge for academics and open a theoretical and a practical debate.

Regionally integrated asset pricing on the African stock markets: Evidence from the Fama French and Carhart models

The study explores regionally integrated asset pricing on the African Stock Markets (ASMs) via the Fama-French model. It investigates the ability of the model to capture African equity returns at the regional level. It also explores the question of absolute versus relative measures of size and BM when securities are pooled across markets. Absolute proxies may have potential confounding effects or may be appropriate in integrated markets. The study achieves this by scaling the size and BM of each firm by its cross-sectional means or cross-sectional standard deviations for the security’s market on the portfolio formation date. The analysis employs the Fama-French model in a cross-country setting. Evidence is provided that both size and BM effects exist on the pooled ASMs. The BM effect, however, appears stronger than the size effect. Also, the pricing errors are higher when size and BM are measured relative to their individual country averages rather than to that of the entire pooled sample. We observe lower mispricing when size and BM are estimated in relation to their cross-sectional standard deviations for the respective countries. Evidence is provided that asset pricing on the ASMs is largely not regionally integrated. The evidence shows that the effect of illiquidity in describing the returns of a pooled sample could be overstated by uncontrolled disparities between the characteristics of the pooled markets if the markets exhibit some degree of segmentation.

The Real Effects of Liquidity During the Financial Crisis: Evidence from Automobiles*

AbstractIlliquidity in short-term credit markets during the financial crisis might have severely curtailed the supply of nonbank consumer credit. Using a new data set linking every car sold in the United States to the credit supplier involved in each transaction, we find that the collapse of the asset-backed commercial paper market reduced the financing capacity of such nonbank lenders as captive leasing companies in the automobile industry. As a result, car sales in counties that traditionally depended on nonbank lenders declined sharply. Although other lenders increased their supply of credit, the net aggregate effect of illiquidity on car sales is large and negative. We conclude that the decline in auto sales during the financial crisis was caused in part by a credit supply shock driven by the illiquidity of the most important providers of consumer finance in the auto loan market. These results also imply that interventions aimed at arresting illiquidity in short-term credit markets might have helped contain the real effects of the crisis.

Momentum profits and time varying illiquidity effect

We study the variations in the US momentum returns using shocks to contemporaneous and lagged market illiquidity. We assert that the momentum strategy is hedged against systematic illiquidity risk. The impact of systematic illiquidity risk on momentum profits is shown to be distinctive from the effect of supplying liquidity. Our results show that the contemporaneous effect of systematic illiquidity dominates the opposite prediction of lagged systematic illiquidity and retains its significance even if variables capturing the time varying exposures of momentum returns to market risk are included in the analysis.

Illiquidity and its discontents: Trading delays and foreclosures in the housing market

The macroeconomic effects of housing illiquidity are analyzed using a novel directed search model of housing with long-term debt and default. Debt overhang emerges when highly leveraged sellers are forced to post high prices that produce long selling delays. These delays increase foreclosures, raise default premia, and curtail credit. Cheaper credit fuels temporarily higher house prices, faster sales, and fewer foreclosures, but the borrowing surge facilitates future debt overhang and default. More stringent foreclosure punishments also expand credit and, therefore, either generate higher foreclosures or more debt overhang. Leverage caps avoid this conundrum but reduce welfare by restricting borrowing.

Portfolio dynamics under illiquidity

Purpose This paper aims to explore the effects of illiquidity on portfolio weight and return dynamics. Design/methodology/approach Using a novel continuous-time framework, the paper makes two key contributions to the literature on asset pricing and illiquidity. The first is to study the effects of illiquidity on portfolio weight dynamics. The second contribution is to analyze how illiquidity affects the risk/return dynamics of a portfolio. Findings The numerical results highlight that investors should be prepared for potentially large and skewed variations in portfolio weights and can be away from optimal diversification for a long time when adding illiquid assets to a portfolio. Additionally, the paper shows that illiquidity increases portfolio risk. Interestingly, this effect gets more pronounced when the return correlation between the illiquid and liquid asset is low. Thus, there is a correlation effect in the sense that illiquidity costs, as measured by the increase in overall portfolio risk, are inversely related to the return correlation of the assets. Originality/value This is the first paper that highlights that the increase in portfolio risk caused by illiquidity is inversely related to the return correlation between the liquid and illiquid assets. This important economic result contrasts with the widely used argument that the benefit of adding illiquid (alternative) assets to a portfolio is their low correlation with (traditional) traded assets. The results imply that the benefits of adding illiquid assets to a portfolio can be much lower than typically perceived.

German Mittelstand Bonds: Yield Spreads and Liquidity

We estimate a cross-sectional model of the yield spreads of German Mittelstand bonds as a function of liquidity measures as well as a number of variables that control for both the characteristics of the issuing firm and the bond characteristics. Our results show a significant positive effect of illiquidity on the yield spread, which persists after controlling for the risk of the bond. Economically, the size of the liquidity premium of Mittelstand bonds is approximately twice the size of speculative grade US corporate bonds. Our findings are robust to different measures of liquidity and potential endogeneity biases.