We examine when anomaly returns occur in order to understand if they exist. If anomalies are spurious, then anomaly returns should not depend on their proximity to the dates on which key anomaly information is released. Yet, they do. Using a powerful database containing the precise release date...

We use the 2008 short selling regulations to conduct the first test of Diamond and Verrecchia's (1987) counterintuitive prediction that short sale constraints can actually increase the information content of short sales. The emergency order made it difficult and costly for short sellers without...

Using unique data from 12 lenders, we examine how equity lending fees respond to demand shocks. We find that when demand is moderate, fees are largely insensitive to demand shocks. However, at high demand levels, further increases in demand lead to significantly higher fees and the extent to...

We identify a setting in which there is a predictable incentive for short sellers to manipulate prices, and we find patterns consistent with short sellers manipulating prices. Specifically, we find that stocks with high short interest experience abnormally low returns on the last trading day of...

We document that short sellers exploit both post-earnings-announcement drift and the accrual anomaly. In addition, using a unique dataset of shares available for borrowing as of the earnings announcement date, we find that short selling plays an important role in the pricing of accruals: the...

The standard analysis of corporate governance is that shareholders vote in the ratios that firms choose, such as one-share-one-vote. But if the cost of unbundling and trading votes is sufficiently low, then shareholders choose the ratios. We document an active market for votes within the...

Regulations allow market makers to short sell without borrowing stock, and the transactions of a major options market maker show that in most hard-to-borrow situations, it chooses not to borrow and instead fails to deliver stock to its buyers. Some of the value of failing passes through to...

A share's ownership of record can trade separately from its beneficial ownership, through equity loans. In a year of transactions by a major lender, we analyze the market for ownership of record on dates when this ownership is important: the record dates of votes, when loans transfer votes, and...

We study a set of trading restrictions imposed by Robinhood and other retail-oriented broker-dealers in 38 stocks, including GameStop. Restrictions limit equity and/or options positions. Stock price effects are large, with CARs averaging -13.54% within two hours after a stock’s first trading...

By 2012, all European Union countries began requiring the disclosure of large short positions. This regime change reduced short interest, bid-ask spreads, and the informativeness of prices. After specific disclosures, short-run abnormal returns are insignificantly negative, but 90-day cumulative...