Liquidity in asset pricing: New evidence using low frequency data

Employing a new proxy for liquidity, this paper examines its impact on stock returns in the context of the Fama-French framework. We augment the Carhart four-factor model with a liquidity factor and employ individual and system regression techniques. Using an extensive dataset drawn from the Australian equities market, we find a significant illiquidity premium and evidence that liquidity explains a portion of the common variation in stock returns even after controlling for size, book-to-market and momentum. However, our findings suggest that the liquidity factor only adds marginal explanatory power to contemporary asset pricing models.