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Liquidity, asymmetric information and asset pricing on the Russian stock market
In this paper we investigate how asymmetric information and informed trading influences liquidity and how liquidity influences asset pricing on the Russian stock market in 1998-2011. We use a battery of existing liquidity proxies as well as our own modification of Lesmond et al. (1999) measure and capture informed trading through positive daily return autocorrelation. We find that asymmetric information worsens liquidity, whereas no supportive evidence of adverse impact of informed trading can be discovered, which could be partly due to a weak proxy. Furthermore, liquidity, along with market risk, seems to be the major driver of asset pricing on the Russian stock market. This result, however, is not robust to specifying liquidity as characteristic rather than factor.