Naked short selling and purposeful fails-to-deliver have been identified in the popular press and by the SEC as contributing factors to the stock market decline in 2008. We investigate the market impact of the announcement that fails-to-deliver have occurred for a sample of real estate...

We investigate the impact of failures-to-deliver on the performance of 116 Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) during a period of substantial short selling (calendar years 2007 and 2008). REIT shares typically are easy to borrow, have high transparency (low information asymmetry), and are...