The Noninformation Cost of Trading and Its Relative Importance in Asset Pricing

Abstract

We show that the noninformation component of trading costs is priced in the cross-section of stock returns using intraday data for NYSE/AMEX stocks. More importantly, we show that the noninformation component is much larger and more strongly related to stock returns than is the adverse-selection component, indicating that the noninformation component plays a more important role in asset pricing than does the adverse-section component. We conduct a variety of robustness tests and show that our main results hold for different estimation methods, measures of the adverse-selection cost, subsample periods, and control variables. We offer plausible explanations for these results.

Keywords: Order Flows, Lee-Ready Method, Holden-Jacobsen Algorithm, Trading Costs, Order-Processing Cost, Inventory-Holding Cost, Non-Information Cost, Information Asymmetry, Adverse-Section Cost, Asset Pricing, Equilibrium Returns

JEL Classification: G12