Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Finance and Financial Management

Singapore Management University

Series

2017

Short selling

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Short Selling And Economic Policy Uncertainty, Xiaping Cao, Yuchen Wang, Sili Zhou Apr 2017

Short Selling And Economic Policy Uncertainty, Xiaping Cao, Yuchen Wang, Sili Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study the trading behavior of short sellers in the presence of economic policy uncertainty (EPU). Daily short selling activity at either the aggregate level or the individual stock level is increasing in the EPU index (Baker, Bloom and Davis, 2016). EPU has great explanatory power for short trading. Cross-sectional tests show that the increase in short interest under high political uncertainty is from shorting stocks characterized by higher mispricing, greater policy sensitivity, higher illiquidity, greater volatility or analyst dispersion. Short sellers earn abnormal profits by trading on public information related to EPU.


Are Shorts Equally Informed? A Global Perspective, Ekkehart Boehmer, Zsuzsa R. Huszar, Yanchu Wang, Xiaoyan Wang Jan 2017

Are Shorts Equally Informed? A Global Perspective, Ekkehart Boehmer, Zsuzsa R. Huszar, Yanchu Wang, Xiaoyan Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Short selling predicts future stock returns globally. We use 11 short-sale measures to examine the informativeness of short sales in 38 countries for the July 2006 to December 2014 period. We find that different short-sale measures display different return predictability. The days-to-cover ratio and loan supply measures have the most robust predictive power in the global capital market. We also document significant cross-country differences in the predictive power of the short selling measures and find that return predictability is stronger in countries with mild forms of short-sale restrictions, better market quality, and more developed markets.