Using microdata on stock-level lending positions from German mutual funds, we show that active funds use the equity lending market to obtain information about short sale demand. Funds reduce long positions in response to these demand signals, which allows fund managers to front-run public...

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...

We show that mutual funds use information acquired by participating in the equity lending market to make portfolio allocation decisions. Using data from German mutual funds on their stock-level lending decisions, we find that funds lending shares are more likely to exit positions relative both...

Regulators, exchanges, and politicians are considering reining in maker-taker pricing, which is used as a competitive tool by trading venues to acquire order flow. Examining the 2013 reduction in trading fees operated by BATS on its European venues, we document significant effects on market...

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...

I study short-sale constraints in a market with asymmetric information. I offer a novel approach endogenizing short-sale constraints by including an asset-borrowing market in my model. Short-sellers have to borrow an asset and therefore reveal information to a lender. The lender trades on her...

We investigate the impact of short selling and margin trading on measures of price efficiency, characteristics of stock returns distributions, and price clustering in the Chinese equity market. Short selling and margin trading was permitted on selected stocks from March 31, 2010 and was...

At the end of January 2021, a group of stocks listed on US stock exchanges experienced sudden surges in their stock prices, which - coupled with high short interest – led to brief short squeeze episodes. We argue that these short squeezes were the result of coordinated trading by retail...

Based on the ongoing disclosure overload debate, this paper investigates how deregulation-driven decreases in quarterly disclosure affect information asymmetry. We exploit a German setting in which the minimum content requirements for quarterly reporting have been reduced for firms listed in the...

We obtain a unique dataset to examine the effect of the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect program, which allows foreign investors from Hong Kong to buy stocks listed in Shanghai (northbound) and domestic investors from mainland China to buy stocks listed in Hong Kong (southbound). There is a...