Essays on Liquidity in Financial Markets

Abstract

This dissertation contributes to a better understanding of liquidity in financial markets. Relying on the latest proxies for liquidity and TAQ benchmark data, this dissertation investigates liquidity in financial markets from different perspectives and gives answers to crucial challenges when assessing the importance of liquidity; its time-varying commonality across assets and stock markets; its impact on asset pricing in abnormal market states and finally its dynamics and determinants on a daily basis. This study has implications for investors and market makers as part of risk management and portfolio diversification and for policy makers in the context of designing optimal regulatory frameworks to predict and prevent common sources of liquidity tightness in global financial markets.

In the second chapter, I study commonality in liquidity and its association to market volatility. Taking on a global perspective on this matter and examining nine major stock markets, I first construct a novel and dynamic measure of commonality in liquidity. I show that liquidity commonality is present in global stock markets and increases parallel to crisis periods. This finding points towards abrupt changes in liquidity fundamentals and clearly provide evidence for demand- and supply-driven sources of commonality in liquidity (i.e. correlated trading behavior on institutional level paired with restrictions on funding capital) on a global scale. Driven by the well acknowledged findings of a positive relationship between volatility and illiquidity, I investigate the time-varying tie between common variation in liquidity and volatility. Using a dynamic granger-causality test, I find that global market volatility always causes commonality in liquidity while commonality in liquidity causes volatility only in sub-periods, spanning over the financial crisis and its aftermath period.

In the third chapter, I examine the effect of systemic liquidity risk as a priced risk factor in asset pricing. Hereby, I challenge the previous literature in their finding of a linear relationship between systemic liquidity risk and asset prices. I show that systemic liquidity risk is not always a priced factor in the explanation of asset prices. I find that systemic liquidity risk and asset prices are negatively associated in bad market states. This finding can be explained by downward trended liquidity spirals, in other words, an interaction between demand and supply-sided commonality in liquidity, which cause a depression in asset pricing during bad market states. I also show that liquidity risk has a positive link to asset pricing in good market states, which is mainly associated with search-for-yield considerations. Finally, I document that there is no significant relationship between systemic liquidity risk and asset pricing during normal market swings. This finding supports the initial claim that market participants do not worry too much about the state of market-wide liquidity during regular times.

In the fourth chapter, I investigate daily liquidity and trading activity of energy stocks traded at U.S. stock exchanges, categorized into five energy sectors, that is, oil and gas, coal mining, renewables, electric- and multi-utilities. Using TAQ (trades and quotes) data, I examine various dimensions of liquidity and trading – effective spreads, price impact of trades, number of trades and volume – on sectoral level. I document cross-sectional differences in the level of liquidity and trading across energy stock segments. I find that liquidity and trading is trended and exhibit serial dependency up to higher lags, similarly across sectors. There is a weekly pattern for trading and liquidity, both decline on Fridays, on average. I also identify a number of factors that affect trading and liquidity commonly across sectors, that is, general market movements, short-term momentum runs and overall stock market volatility, which points again towards the direction of correlated trading, amplified by institutional investors. Moreover, I show that trading and liquidity are sensitive to a widening Term Spread. I find a heterogeneous effect of the oil price on liquidity and trading activity, dependent on the energy segment. Despite controlling for stock market volatility, I observe that illiquidity and trading increase with higher levels of oil price volatility. Finally, I show that trading activity, both, in number of trade executions and share volume, increases for renewable and multi-utility stocks when climate change receives global media attention.

Fast markets and increased trading make liquidity to be one of the top considerations in the smooth functioning of financial markets, especially in the light of financial distress and sudden, downward trended liquidity spirals, where liquidity adjusts to different equilibria levels. For future discussion, there is further need to address liquidity in its different dimensions and in the context of financial market quality, information efficiency and sentiment. This dissertation is yet another step for a more comprehensive knowledge on liquidity.