This study explores the role of short sale constraints in explaining the variation in premiums to Net Asset Value (NAV) in REIT pricing. We use proprietary information on short sales between June 2006 and September 2008 to examine how short sales and short sale constraints affect the variation...

Research argues that short sellers are informed investors as current short selling relates inversely with future returns. However, empirical results have yet to determine whether short sellers trade on private information before, say, an upcoming negative new. This paper takes a step in this...

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...

Regulatory and media concern has focused heavily on the potentially manipulative distortion of market prices associated with naked short selling. However, naked shorting can also have beneficial effects for liquidity and pricing efficiency. We empirically investigate the impact of naked...

We examine the economic determinants of short-sale supply, and its consequences for future stock returns. Lendable supply increases with expected borrowing costs and decreases with financial statement constructs that indicate overvaluation. Although rising loan fees help ease supply, we find...

The effectiveness of any sanction depends on the costs of avoiding its restrictions. We examine whether bearish option strategies were substitutes for short sales during the September 2008 short-sale ban. We find a significant diminution in option volumes and a significant increase in option...

We find that both institutional owners and short sellers decrease their positions prior to earnings announcements, and increase their positions in the post-announcement period. Pre-announcement changes in institutional holdings and short interest have significant explanatory power with respect...

This paper examines whether corporate managers follow the collective actions of arbitrageurs, measured by short interest, in deciding whether to conduct seasoned equity offers (SEOs). We find that short interest predicts future SEOs and has a marginal impact comparable to well-known predictors....