This Paper examines the price differences between very liquid on-the-run US Treasury securities and less liquid off-the-run securities over the entire on/off cycle. Unlike previous studies, by comparing pairs of securities as their relative liquidity varies over time, we can disregard any cross-sectional differences between the securities. Also, since the liquidity of Treasury notes varies predictably over time we are able to distinguish between current liquidity and expected future liquidity. We show that the more liquid security is priced higher on average, but that this difference depends on the amount of expected future liquidity over its remaining lifetime rather than its current liquidity. We measure future liquidity using both quotes and trades. The liquidity measures include bid-ask spread, depth and trading activity. Examining a variety of liquidity measures enables us to evaluate their relative importance and to identify the liquidity proxies that most affect prices. Although all the measures are highly correlated with one another, we find that quoted bid-ask spread and quoted depth are more important than effective spread and trade size, respectively. Among measures of market activity, however, the number of trades and volume are more related to the liquidity premium than the number of quotes.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers in its series CEPR Discussion Papers with number
3900.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: