We use a heterogeneous agent model to explain market crashes resulting from an unanticipated deleveraging shock. In a market with short sale constraints, when the opinions of investors diverge substantially, the market price is set by the demand schedule of optimistic investors while pessimistic...

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...

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...

Disagreement about stock valuation, combined with short-sales constraints, can increase asset prices. We build a model showing that, so long as investor beliefs are not perfectly correlated, investors will disagree less about the value of a conglomerate than about each of its individual...

Short sellers have been routinely blamed for triggering, or exacerbating, stock market declines. The experience of Taiwan provides an interesting case study of the impact of short selling bans on stock returns volatility in a time series framework due to the length of time the short selling ban...

I investigate whether the relation between investor sentiment and profitable trading strategies is due to short sale constraints. I find that the average security in these strategies is not hard-to-short. Furthermore, the short leg does not appear to be harder to short or more overvalued than...

In financial markets, professional traders leverage their trades because it allows to trade larger positions with less margin. Violating margin requirements, however, triggers a margin call and open positions are automatically covered until requirements are met again. What impact does margin...

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...

We investigate the impact of short-sale and margin-purchase on stock price crash risk in the Chinese markets. China lifted bans on short-sale and margin-purchase for stocks on an expanding designated list since March 2010. Results of difference in different tests reveal that the removal of bans...