Trading Costs and Returns for U.S. Equities: Estimating Effective Costs from Daily Data

The effective cost of trading is usually estimated from transaction‐level data. This study proposes a Gibbs estimate that is based on daily closing prices. In a validation sample, the daily Gibbs estimate achieves a correlation of 0.965 with the transaction‐level estimate. When the Gibbs estimates are incorporated into asset pricing specifications over a long historical sample (1926 to 2006), the results suggest that effective cost (as a characteristic) is positively related to stock returns. The relation is strongest in January, but it appears to be distinct from size effects.