A key feature of the 2007-2008 financial crisis is that for some classes of securities trade has ceased. And where trade does occur, it appears that market prices are well below what one might believe to be the intrinsic value for that class of security. This seems to be especially true for...

We propose the Volume Coefficient of Variation (VCV), the ratio of the standard deviation to the mean of trading volume, as a new and easily computable measure of information asymmetry in security markets. We use a microstructure model to demonstrate that VCV is strictly increasing in the...