In light of the recent state of global financial markets, the practice of short selling has come under increasing scrutiny. While financial institutions argue that short selling is a necessary mechanism for price discovery and contributes significantly to market liquidity, regulators view it as...

This paper examines whether the 2011 European short sale ban on financial stocks proved to be successful or had a negative impact on financial markets. We explicitly take an options market perspective and focus on market participants' changes in beliefs and expectations. During the ban, short...

We investigate the liquidity effects of the short sale bans enacted by six European countries in March 2020 in response to the declining market brought about by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Comparing stocks subjected to these bans to those in other European countries that did not...

A number of European countries - Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, and Spain - responded to the market disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic by introducing temporary bans on short-selling activity. These restrictions were imposed on all stocks and remained in place between March 18...

Did the August 2011 European short sale bans on financial stocks accomplish their goals? In order to answer this question, we use stock options' implied volatility skews to proxy for investors' risk aversion. We find that on ban announcement day, risk aversion levels rose for all stocks but more...

I analyze the Granger causality in distribution between sovereign bonds and industry indexes in the five European countries most affected by the debt crisis: Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Prior research assessed the impact of the debt crisis on the financial firms, but its effect...

This paper studies the profitability of a selection of prominent momentum-based strategies in the European Monetary Union. In contrast to past examples documenting the lack of profitability of unconditional price momentum in the most recent decade, the current research finds that unconditional...

In this paper we adapt the demand and supply framework introduced by Figuerola-Ferretti and Gonzalo (Journal of Econometrics 2010) to illustrate the dynamics of pairs trading. We underline the process by which a finite elasticity of demand for spread trading determines the speed of mean...

This paper considers the growth of dark pools: trading venues for equities without pre-trade transparency. It first documents the emergence and expansion of dark pools in European equity markets in the context of regulatory changes and increased high-frequency trading (HFT). It finds that the...

Recent growth in retail trading in global equity markets has drawn considerable attention to the execution of retail flows. European market operators offer diverse retail trading mechanisms: both retail-specific mechanisms and all-to-all trading mechanisms that allow the interaction of all...