Benchmarking liquidity proxies: The case of EU sovereign bonds

We examine effective measures of liquidity in the context of EU sovereign bonds and the Basel III regulatory framework. We observe that the empirical correlations between benchmarks and proxies are typically very low and in general become weaker as the frequency over which these relationships are examined becomes higher, and that the relative strength of the various proxies may change with the frequency considered. The main implications of our results for the EU sovereign bond market are (i) the use of liquidity proxies may lead to erroneous conclusions; (ii) any liquidity measure needs to be assessed against the relevant timeframe for conversion into cash; and (iii) the end-of-day spread is the best performing proxy across different frequencies.