We introduce an evolutionary equilibrium asset pricing model with heterogeneous agents who can either act as brokers or hedge funds. Hedge funds can trade on margin, taking short or (leveraged) long positions in the assets. Brokers provide asset loans and credit to margin traders. In any...

I study the market for lending and borrowing securities in the United States. I find that by making securities available for borrowing, mutual funds acquire information about short selling, which they exploit for trading. Funds with discretion in their investment choices rebalance their...

On October 26, 2008, Porsche announced a largely unexpected domination plan for Volkswagen. The resulting short squeeze in Volkswagen's stock briefly made it the most valuable listed company in the world. We argue that this was a manipulation designed to save Porsche from insolvency and the...

This paper examines unique data on dark pool activity for a large cross-section of US stocks in 2009. Dark pool activity is concentrated in liquid stocks. Nasdaq (AMEX) stocks have significantly higher (lower) dark pool activity than NYSE stocks controlling for liquidity. For a given stock, dark...

We study empirically whether short selling deters the incorporation of positive information. We find a sizeable reduction of positive information impounding before earnings announcements for stocks more exposed to short selling. The price pressure from short selling cannot explain this effect....

In financial markets, professional traders leverage their trades because it allows to trade larger positions with less margin. Violating margin requirements, however, triggers a margin call and open positions are automatically covered until requirements are met again. What impact does margin...

This paper analyzes how newly introduced transparency requirements for short positions affect investors' behavior and security prices. Employing a unique data set, which contains both public positions above and confidential positions below the regulatory disclosure threshold, we offer several...

We create proxies for constrained supply of lendable shares by combining unique data on loan fees, stock lending activity, and failures to deliver to examine how contrarian short-sale strategies are affected by constraints. Constraints affect roughly one-third of the cross- section of stocks and...

We consider whether traders are more likely to commit securities violations when trading at home, a new form of working induced by the Covid pandemic. We examine data pre- and post-Covid, during which some traders were unexpectedly forced to work at home. The data indicate the presence of both a...