Traditional SEOs elicit short selling from traders trying to increase offering discounts. Such short selling is more difficult for shelf offerings, as the time between their announcement and issuance tends to be shorter. We predict and find that firms with higher short-selling potential (SSP)...

Hard-to-value stocks provide opportunities for managers to exploit their informational advantage through trading on their firms' and their own personal accounts. In contrast to the prediction that such transactions reflect private information about future events, they are contrarian and heavily...