Emergency Short Selling Restrictions in theCourse of the Financial Crisis

This paper summarizes the short selling restrictions adopted—mainly on anemergency basis—in the time period of July 2008 up to mid-June 2010 in 56countries around the world. It is a supplement to a recent article of theauthors (Gruenewald et al., 2010) and gives a detailed overview of theregulators’ short-term measures ranging from complete short selling bans toextra disclosure obligations for short sellers. The overview includes themeasures’ time frame, type and exceptions as well as information on thetargeted firms. Although not all countries have implemented short sellingrestrictions, their impact is massive: Approximately 80% of the December2008 stock market capitalizations of the countries in our sample weredirectly or indirectly affected by some emergency short selling restriction.