Abstract:
For the bond market, an over the counter market, how to measure the liquidity of bond market accurately is a crucial problem in market microstructure. Adopting intraday data from 2008 to 2014 on China's corporate bond market, expanding the High-Low estimation method proposed by Corwin and Schultz,estimates of new and widely employed low-frequency liquidity measures were made in the literature against liquidity benchmarks including four trading costs and one price impact measures, and the applicability of different liquidity measures on China's bond market was explored. The empirical results reveal that among the trading cost measures, the FHT estimator enjoys the lowest estimation error and highest correlation with benchmarks, and the extended High-Low estimator and Roll estimator take the second place, while Amihud liquidity ratio measure owns the highest correlation through all price impact measures. Since the related issues such as asset pricing focus on correlation performance of the low frequency liquidity measures, and liquidity estimation precision is mostly associated with market effectiveness test and corporate finance, the appropriate liquidity measures should be adopted due to different research emphasis of the bond market's empirical studies.