IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jfinec/v142y2021i1p314-337.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Bias in the effective bid-ask spread

Author

Listed:
  • Hagströmer, Björn

Abstract

The effective bid-ask spread measured relative to the spread midpoint overstates the true effective bid-ask spread in markets with discrete prices and elastic liquidity demand. The average bias is 13%–18% for S&P 500 stocks in general, depending on the estimator used as benchmark, and up to 97% for low-priced stocks. Cross-sectional bias variation across stocks, trading venues, and investor groups can influence research inference. The use of the midpoint also undermines liquidity timing and trading performance evaluations, and can lead non-sophisticated investors to overpay for liquidity. To overcome these problems, the paper proposes new estimators of the effective bid-ask spread.

Suggested Citation

  • Hagströmer, Björn, 2021. "Bias in the effective bid-ask spread," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 142(1), pages 314-337.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jfinec:v:142:y:2021:i:1:p:314-337
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jfineco.2021.04.018
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X21001458
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jfineco.2021.04.018?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Thierry Foucault & Ohad Kadan & Eugene Kandel, 2005. "Limit Order Book as a Market for Liquidity," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 18(4), pages 1171-1217.
    2. Kenneth A. Kavajecz, 1999. "A Specialist's Quoted Depth and the Limit Order Book," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 54(2), pages 747-771, April.
    3. Andriy Shkilko & Konstantin Sokolov, 2020. "Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining: Fast Trading, Microwave Connectivity, and Trading Costs," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 75(6), pages 2899-2927, December.
    4. Marshall E. Blume & Michael A. Goldstein, "undated". "Displayed and Effective Spreads by Market (Revision of 4-92)," Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research Working Papers 27-92, Wharton School Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research.
    5. Huang, Roger D. & Stoll, Hans R., 1996. "Dealer versus auction markets: A paired comparison of execution costs on NASDAQ and the NYSE," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(3), pages 313-357, July.
    6. Craig W. Holden & Stacey Jacobsen, 2014. "Liquidity Measurement Problems in Fast, Competitive Markets: Expensive and Cheap Solutions," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 69(4), pages 1747-1785, August.
    7. Anshuman, V Ravi & Kalay, Avner, 1998. "Market Making with Discrete Prices," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 11(1), pages 81-109.
    8. Pastor, Lubos & Stambaugh, Robert F., 2003. "Liquidity Risk and Expected Stock Returns," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 111(3), pages 642-685, June.
    9. Fang, Vivian W. & Noe, Thomas H. & Tice, Sheri, 2009. "Stock market liquidity and firm value," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 94(1), pages 150-169, October.
    10. Glosten, Lawrence R, 1994. "Is the Electronic Open Limit Order Book Inevitable?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 49(4), pages 1127-1161, September.
    11. Lee, Charles M C & Ready, Mark J, 1991. "Inferring Trade Direction from Intraday Data," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 46(2), pages 733-746, June.
    12. Harold Demsetz, 1968. "The Cost of Transacting," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 82(1), pages 33-53.
    13. Shkilko, Andriy V. & Van Ness, Bonnie F. & Van Ness, Robert A., 2008. "Locked and crossed markets on NASDAQ and the NYSE," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 11(3), pages 308-337, August.
    14. Carrion, Allen, 2013. "Very fast money: High-frequency trading on the NASDAQ," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 16(4), pages 680-711.
    15. Amihud, Yakov, 2002. "Illiquidity and stock returns: cross-section and time-series effects," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 5(1), pages 31-56, January.
    16. Conrad, Jennifer & Wahal, Sunil & Xiang, Jin, 2015. "High-frequency quoting, trading, and the efficiency of prices," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 116(2), pages 271-291.
    17. Asani Sarkar & Robert A. Schwartz, 2009. "Market Sidedness: Insights into Motives for Trade Initiation," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 64(1), pages 375-423, February.
    18. Randi Næs & Johannes A. Skjeltorp & Bernt Arne Ødegaard, 2011. "Stock Market Liquidity and the Business Cycle," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 66(1), pages 139-176, February.
    19. Goldstein, Michael A. & A. Kavajecz, Kenneth, 2000. "Eighths, sixteenths, and market depth: changes in tick size and liquidity provision on the NYSE," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(1), pages 125-149, April.
    20. Bessembinder, Hendrik & Kaufman, Herbert M., 1997. "A cross-exchange comparison of execution costs and information flow for NYSE-listed stocks," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 46(3), pages 293-319, December.
    21. Lee, Charles M C, 1993. "Market Integration and Price Execution for NYSE-Listed Securities," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 48(3), pages 1009-1038, July.
    22. Farshid Abdi & Angelo Ranaldo, 2017. "A Simple Estimation of Bid-Ask Spreads from Daily Close, High, and Low Prices," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 30(12), pages 4437-4480.
    23. Bessembinder, Hendrik, 2003. "Trade Execution Costs and Market Quality after Decimalization," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 38(4), pages 747-777, December.
    24. Rama Cont & Arseniy Kukanov & Sasha Stoikov, 2014. "The Price Impact of Order Book Events," Journal of Financial Econometrics, Oxford University Press, vol. 12(1), pages 47-88.
    25. Sasha Stoikov, 2018. "The micro-price: a high-frequency estimator of future prices," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(12), pages 1959-1966, December.
    26. Korajczyk, Robert A. & Sadka, Ronnie, 2008. "Pricing the commonality across alternative measures of liquidity," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 87(1), pages 45-72, January.
    27. Parlour, Christine A, 1998. "Price Dynamics in Limit Order Markets," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 11(4), pages 789-816.
    28. Mitchell A. Petersen, 2009. "Estimating Standard Errors in Finance Panel Data Sets: Comparing Approaches," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(1), pages 435-480, January.
    29. Aldrich, Eric M. & Lee, Seung, 2018. "Relative spread and price discovery," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 81-98.
    30. Eric Budish & Peter Cramton & John Shim, 2015. "Editor's Choice The High-Frequency Trading Arms Race: Frequent Batch Auctions as a Market Design Response," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 130(4), pages 1547-1621.
    31. Jonathan Brogaard & Terrence Hendershott & Ryan Riordan, 2014. "High-Frequency Trading and Price Discovery," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 27(8), pages 2267-2306.
    32. Shane A. Corwin & Paul Schultz, 2012. "A Simple Way to Estimate Bid‐Ask Spreads from Daily High and Low Prices," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 67(2), pages 719-760, April.
    33. Mohammad Jahan-Parvar & Filip Zikes, 2019. "When do low-frequency measures really measure transaction costs?," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2019-051, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    34. Terrence Hendershott & Charles M. Jones & Albert J. Menkveld, 2011. "Does Algorithmic Trading Improve Liquidity?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 66(1), pages 1-33, February.
    35. Chen Yao & Mao Ye, 2018. "Why Trading Speed Matters: A Tale of Queue Rationing under Price Controls," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 31(6), pages 2157-2183.
    36. Chakrabarty, Bidisha & Pascual, Roberto & Shkilko, Andriy, 2015. "Evaluating trade classification algorithms: Bulk volume classification versus the tick rule and the Lee-Ready algorithm," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 25(C), pages 52-79.
    37. Mauricio Labadie & Charles-Albert Lehalle, 2010. "Optimal algorithmic trading and market microstructure," Working Papers hal-00590283, HAL.
    38. Hasbrouck, Joel, 2002. "Stalking the "efficient price" in market microstructure specifications: an overview," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 5(3), pages 329-339, July.
    39. Ronald L. Goettler & Christine A. Parlour & Uday Rajan, 2005. "Equilibrium in a Dynamic Limit Order Market," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 60(5), pages 2149-2192, October.
    40. Petersen, Mitchell A. & Fialkowski, David, 1994. "Posted versus effective spreads *1: Good prices or bad quotes?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 269-292, June.
    41. Joel Hasbrouck, 2009. "Trading Costs and Returns for U.S. Equities: Estimating Effective Costs from Daily Data," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 64(3), pages 1445-1477, June.
    42. Jonathan Brogaard & Björn Hagströmer & Lars Nordén & Ryan Riordan, 2015. "Trading Fast and Slow: Colocation and Liquidity," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 28(12), pages 3407-3443.
    43. Roll, Richard, 1984. "A Simple Implicit Measure of the Effective Bid-Ask Spread in an Efficient Market," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 39(4), pages 1127-1139, September.
    44. Goyenko, Ruslan Y. & Holden, Craig W. & Trzcinka, Charles A., 2009. "Do liquidity measures measure liquidity?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(2), pages 153-181, May.
    45. Kerry Back & Shmuel Baruch, 2013. "Strategic Liquidity Provision in Limit Order Markets," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 81(1), pages 363-392, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jean-Laurent Cadorel, 2023. "The 1929 Crash of the New York Stock Exchange as a Liquidity Crisis [Le Krach de 1929 du New York Stock Exchange comme crise de liquidité]," Post-Print hal-04347097, HAL.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Craig W. Holden & Stacey Jacobsen & Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, 2014. "The Empirical Analysis of Liquidity," Foundations and Trends(R) in Finance, now publishers, vol. 8(4), pages 263-365, December.
    2. Vayanos, Dimitri & Wang, Jiang, 2013. "Market Liquidity—Theory and Empirical Evidence ," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1289-1361, Elsevier.
    3. Díaz, Antonio & Escribano, Ana, 2020. "Measuring the multi-faceted dimension of liquidity in financial markets: A literature review," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 51(C).
    4. Albuquerque, Rui & Song, Shiyun & Yao, Chen, 2020. "The price effects of liquidity shocks: A study of the SEC’s tick size experiment," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 138(3), pages 700-724.
    5. Murphy Jun Jie Lee, 2013. "The Microstructure of Trading Processes on the Singapore Exchange," PhD Thesis, Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney, number 4, July-Dece.
    6. Zeynep Cobandag Guloglu & Cumhur Ekinci, 2022. "Liquidity measurement: A comparative review of the literature with a focus on high frequency," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 36(1), pages 41-74, February.
    7. Murphy Jun Jie Lee, 2013. "The Microstructure of Trading Processes on the Singapore Exchange," PhD Thesis, Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney, number 2-2013.
    8. Chung, Kee H. & Zhang, Hao, 2014. "A simple approximation of intraday spreads using daily data," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 17(C), pages 94-120.
    9. Kale, Jayant R. & Loon, Yee Cheng, 2011. "Product market power and stock market liquidity," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 14(2), pages 376-410, May.
    10. Marshall, Ben R. & Nguyen, Nhut H. & Visaltanachoti, Nuttawat, 2018. "Do liquidity proxies measure liquidity accurately in ETFs?," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 55(C), pages 94-111.
    11. Thomas Johann & Erik Theissen, 2013. "Liquidity measures," Chapters, in: Adrian R. Bell & Chris Brooks & Marcel Prokopczuk (ed.), Handbook of Research Methods and Applications in Empirical Finance, chapter 10, pages 238-255, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    12. Arthur Akhmetov & Anna Burova & Natalia Makhankova & Alexey Ponomarenko, 2021. "Measuring Market Liquidity and Liquidity Mismatches across Sectors," Bank of Russia Working Paper Series wps82, Bank of Russia.
    13. Albuquerque, Rui & Song, Shiyun & Yao, Chen, 2017. "The Price Effects of Liquidity Shocks: A Study of SEC’s Tick-Size Experiment," CEPR Discussion Papers 12486, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    14. Petter Dahlström & Björn Hagströmer & Lars L. Nordén, 2024. "The determinants of limit order cancellations," The Financial Review, Eastern Finance Association, vol. 59(1), pages 181-201, February.
    15. Lauter, Tobias & Prokopczuk, Marcel, 2022. "Measuring commodity market quality," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 145(C).
    16. Biais, Bruno & Glosten, Larry & Spatt, Chester, 2005. "Market microstructure: A survey of microfoundations, empirical results, and policy implications," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 8(2), pages 217-264, May.
    17. Vayanos, Dimitri & Wang, Jiang, 2012. "Market liquidity - theory and empirical evidence," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 119044, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    18. Huong Le & Andros Gregoriou, 2020. "How Do You Capture Liquidity? A Review Of The Literature On Low‐Frequency Stock Liquidity," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 34(5), pages 1170-1186, December.
    19. Oliver Linton & Soheil Mahmoodzadeh, 2018. "Implications of High-Frequency Trading for Security Markets," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 10(1), pages 237-259, August.
    20. Cenesizoglu, Tolga & Grass, Gunnar, 2018. "Bid- and ask-side liquidity in the NYSE limit order book," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 38(C), pages 14-38.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Midpoint; Micro-price; Liquidity demand elasticity; Illiquidity; Rule 605;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C15 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - Statistical Simulation Methods: General
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates
    • G20 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jfinec:v:142:y:2021:i:1:p:314-337. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/505576 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.