This paper uses detailed high-frequency regulatory data to evaluate whether trading increases or decreases systemic risk in the U.S. banking sector. We estimate the sensitivity of weekly bank trading net profits to a variety of aggregate risk factors, which include equities, fixed-income,...

We compare popular measures of transaction costs based on daily data with their high-frequency data-based counterparts. We find that for U.S. equities and major foreign exchange rates, (i) the measures based on daily data are highly upward biased and imprecise; (ii) the bias is a function of...

We compare low-frequency measures of effective spreads with their high-frequency counterparts. We find that some popular measures suffer from a volatility-induced bias and that volatility is the primary driver of the variation of these liquidity proxies. We show that such distortions arise when...