Abstract
Næs, Skjeltorp, and Ødegaard (2011) provide empirical evidence that stock market liquidity contains leading information about future economic activity. Their result suggests a rebalancing of small, increasingly illiquid to large stocks in recession times, an expression of “flight-to-quality”. We show that the relationship no longer holds due to the Fed’s accommodative monetary policy to buoy stock markets in crisis starting in the 1990s. Moreover, we document that liquidity dry-ups in small stocks no longer coincide with recessions. The Fed’s interventions mute the systematic link between monetary conditions and aggregate stock market liquidity’s well-established business cycle component.
Leippold, Markus