Short sellers are perceived as informed, sophisticated investors. Yet little is known about their actual performance and trading strategies. Using a novel, hand-collected data set of daily position disclosures in Europe, we identify the entry, change, and exit dates of large short-sale positions...

The reuse of collateral can support the efficient allocation of safe assets in the financial system. Exploiting a novel dataset, we show that banks substantially increase their reuse of sovereign bonds in response to scarcity induced by Eurosystem asset purchases. While repo rates react little...

Using the exogenous shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, we study how informed market participants evaluate fiscal space. Short-selling activity shifted upon the onset of the pandemic towards companies with low financial flexibility only in countries with limited fiscal space. Among these companies,...

The reuse of collateral can support the efficient allocation of assets in the financial system. Exploiting a novel dataset, we quantify banks' collateral reuse at the security level. We show that banks substantially increase their reuse of collateral in response to scarcity induced by central...

This paper analyzes how newly introduced transparency requirements for short positions affect investors' behavior and security prices. Employing a unique data set, which contains both public positions above and confidential positions below the regulatory disclosure threshold, we offer several...

Using a unique data set that contains the complete ownership structure of the German stock market, we study the momentum and contrarian trading of different investor groups. Foreign investors and financial institutions, and especially mutual funds, are momentum traders, whereas private...

This paper investigates the returns and flows of German money market funds before and during the financial crisis of 2007/2008. The main finding of this paper is that, in liquid times, some money market funds (MMF) enhanced their returns by investing in riskier assets. By doing so they...

We relate Schumpeter's notion of creative destruction to asset pricing, thereby offering a novel explanation of size and value premia. We argue that small-value firms are more likely to be destroyed by serendipitous invention activity, and investors demand higher expected returns for bearing...

This article documents how the changing composition of U.S. publicly traded firms has prompted a decline in the long-run mean of the aggregate dividend-price ratio, most notably since the 1970s. Adjusting the dividend-price ratio for such changes resolves several issues with respect to the...

This paper investigates the relation between mutual fund flows and the real economy. The findings of this paper support the theory that the positive co-movement of flows into equity funds and stock market returns is explained by a common response to macroeconomic news. Variables that predict the...