Recent studies claim that mutual fund managers demonstrate strong MARKET liquidity timing skills. We extend their liquidity timing tests to the four‐factor case and investigate liquidity timing skills with respect to the MARKET, SIZE, VALUE and MOMENTUM factors. Contrary to these claims, we find no evidence that fund managers adjust market exposure in anticipation of market liquidity changes. We find rather strong evidence that fund managers successfully overweight small stocks as market liquidity increases. Our study also demonstrates that it is easy to misidentify SIZE liquidity timing as MARKET liquidity timing in models that focus only on MARKET liquidity timing.

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This paper shows how stock market volatility regimes affect the cross-section of stock returns along quality and liquidity dimensions. We find that, during crisis periods, low quality and low liquidity stocks experience relatively higher losses than predicted in normal times, while high quality and high liquidity stocks experience rather relatively lower losses. These findings lend strong support to the presence of cross-market and within-market flight-to-quality and to-liquidity episodes during crisis periods. During low volatility periods, however, low quality and low liquidity stocks earn relatively larger returns, while high quality and high liquidity stocks yield lower returns; suggesting that low volatility conditions benefit junk and illiquid stocks but not quality and liquid stocks. Finally, our results reveal that liquidity level dominates liquidity beta in explaining stock returns across the different market volatility regimes.

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