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This study examines short selling as one external determinant of corporate tax avoidance. Prior research suggests that short sellers have information advantages over retail investors, and high short-interest levels are a bearish signal of targeted stock prices. As a result, when short-interest levels are high, managers have been shown to take actions to minimize the negative effect of high short interest on firms’ stock prices. Tax-avoidance activities may convey a signal of bad news (i.e., high stock price crash risk). We predict that, when short-interest levels are high, managers possess incentives to reduce firm tax avoidance in order to reduce the associated stock price crash risk. Consistent with this prediction, we find that short interest is negatively associated with subsequent tax-avoidance levels. This effect is incremental to other factors identified by prior research. We conclude that short selling significantly constrains corporate tax avoidance.

This paper examines how sophisticated and better-informed investors, such as short sellers, trade on information along the supply chain. Given the economic linkages between suppliers and customers, one would expect short sellers to trade on such information and to capitalize on investors' inattention to such economic links.

This paper uses both multivariate regression analysis and portfolio analysis where the time series averages of equally weighted monthly portfolio returns are reported to explore the abnormal returns of long-short trading strategies.

Results indicate that short interest predicts unexpected earnings news, consistent with short sellers extracting information from economic relationships. There is a strong negative relationship between short interest in the supplier firm and the one-month future stock return of the customer firm. This negative relation significantly persists for at least 12 months. One plausible channel explaining the information content of supplier (customer) firm's short interest for the customer (supplier) firms is the short sale constraints on the customer (supplier) firms.

The paper addresses a gap in the literature by examining whether short selling in a firm in the months leading up to a customer's (supplier's) negative shock is negatively correlated to the customer's (supplier's) future performance. Overall, the findings suggest that short sellers play an important role in the price discovery of related firms in the supply chain, which is beyond the direct effects documented in prior literature.

High short interest is associated with overvaluation, and the purpose of this paper is to find contradictions to the commonly held “overvaluation hypothesis” when merger and acquisition (M&A) targets are examined. This paper extends the work of Ben-David et al. (2015), who confirm high short interest indicates overvaluation when focused on acquiring firms.

Short interest is examined as a predictor of acquisition likelihood using longitudinal data for US firms from 2003 to 2013. How short interest impacts the premiums paid by acquiring firms is examined with target, acquirer and deal characteristics.

M&A targets have high short interest and short interest increases acquisition likelihood, suggesting undervaluation. Highly shorted firms also experience outsized reductions in share price prior to merger announcements, and the premiums paid are also significantly predicted by short interest levels.

Short selling activity can be motivated for reasons other than overvaluation, and many short positions can be held for long periods before they are closed, leading to high short interest levels for extended periods. Therefore, investors and researchers are cautioned that high short interest levels may exist in stocks that have already declined in price and could be poised for a reversal.

This study adds to the growing body of work indicating that short interest might not be the signal of overvaluation most researchers accept it to be.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which introduction of ETFs reduces short‐sale constraints in their constituent stocks.

First, the introduction of ETFs increases short interest for stocks that they hold. Second, the increase in short interest is highest for the stocks that were most short‐sale constrained. Third, subsequent additions of a stock to an ETF will have a lesser impact on short interest than the first time additions. Finally, using matched control sample and regression analysis approaches, the authors make sure that their results are robust to determinants of short‐selling activity which extant research has found to be relevant.

When a stock is included in an ETF for the first time, the paper finds that the average monthly short‐selling activity of the stock in the six months following ETF‐inclusion is, on average, 33 percent higher than that in six months prior to the inclusion. This effect is the strongest for stocks that are most short‐sale constrained. The analysis of subsequent additions of stocks to ETFs reveals that the effect of increased short‐selling activity is significantly attenuated when compared to the first‐time additions. All of the findings are robust to the matched sample comparisons and multiple regression analysis that account for determinants of short‐selling activity.

This paper shows that: the introduction of ETFs helps relax short‐sale constraints in the market; that the extent to which a stock's outstanding shares are held by one or more ETFs serves as a proxy for the degree to which stocks are short‐sale constrained; and implies that the introduction of ETFs makes the prices of the funds' underlying securities more efficient.

Current US tax laws provide investors an incentive to time the sales of their bonds to minimize tax liability. This gives rise to a tax-timing option that affects bond value. In reality, corporate bond investors’ tax-timing strategy is complicated by risk of default. Existing term structure models have ignored the effect of the tax-timing option, and how much corporate bond value is due to the tax-timing option is unknown. In this chapter, we assess the effects of taxes and stochastic interest rates on the timing option value and equilibrium price of corporate bonds by considering discount and premium amortization, multiple trading dates, transaction costs, and changes in the level and volatility of interest rates. We find that the value of the tax-timing option accounts for a substantial proportion of corporate bond price even when interest rate volatility is low. Ignoring the timing option value results in overestimation of credit spread, and underestimation of default probability and the marginal investor’s income tax rate. These estimation biases generally increase with bond maturity and credit risk.

After loan interest rate upper limit deregulation in October 2004, the financing environment in China changed dramatically, and the banks were eligible for risk compensation. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the influence of the loan interest rate liberalization on firms’ loan maturity structure.

Based on Rajan's (1992) model, the authors constructed a trade-off model of how the banks choose long-term and short-term loans scales, and further analyzed banks’ loan term decisions under the loan interest rate upper limit deregulation or collateral cases. Then the authors used an unbalanced panel data set of 586 Chinese listed manufacturing companies and 9,376 observations during the period 1996-2011 to testify the theoretical conclusion. Furthermore, the authors studied the effect on firms with different characteristics of ownership or scale.

The results show that the loan interest rate liberalization significantly decreases the private companies’ reliance on short-term loans and increases sensitivity to interest rates of state-owned companies’ long-term loans. But the results also show that the companies’ ownership still plays a key role on the long-term loans availability. When monetary policy tightened, small companies still have to borrow short-term loans for long-term purposes. As the bank industry is still dominated by state-owned banks and the deposit interest rate has upper limits, the effect of the loan interest rate liberalization on easing long-term credit constraints is limited.

From a new perspective, the content and findings of this paper contribute to the study of the effect of the interest rate liberalization on China economy.

This study aims to spot wheat data and disaggregated commitment of trader data for CME traded wheat futures to examine the effect of exogenous shocks for hedging positions of Producers and Swap Dealers on cash-futures basis and excess futures returns.

A Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) methodology is used to capture volatility transfer effects.

Evidence is presented that institutional short hedging positions play a major role in the pricing of asymmetric information held by Swap Dealers into the basis. The results also indicate that producer hedging contains information when conditions in the supply chain create a shift in long vs short hedging demand. Finally, the results demonstrate that that Swap Dealer short hedging has the greatest effect on risk premium size and historical volatility.

Various proxies for spot prices are used in the literature, although actual spot price data is not common. In addition, stationarity for basis and open interest data is induced using the Baxter-King filter which allows us to work with levels, rather than percentage changes, in the time series data. This provides the ability to directly observe the effect of outright open interest positions for hedgers on contemporaneous innovations in basis and in excess returns. The use of a BVAR methodology represents an improvement over other structural VAR models by capturing contemporaneous systemic effects within an endogeneity based structural framework.

The purpose of this paper is to provide selected Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Regulatory Notices and Disciplinary Actions issued in June, July, and August 2012.

The paper provides FINRA Regulatory Notice 12‐29, Communications with the Public, and Notice 12‐38, Short Interest Reporting.

Notice 12‐29: the SEC has approved FINRA's proposed rule changes to adopt a new set of communication rules that become effective February 4, 2013. They address communications in three categories: institutional communication, retail communication, and correspondence. Among other things, the rules cover approval, review and recordkeeping requirements; content standards; and guidelines for public appearances. Notice 12‐38: the SEC approved amendments to FINRA Rule 4560 to codify the requirement that member firms report only “gross” short interest existing in each proprietary and customer account (rather than net positions across accounts) and clarify that member firms' short interest reports must reflect only those short interest positions that settled.

These FINRA notices are selected to provide a useful indication of regulatory trends.

This study employs a multivariate GARCH model to investigate the relative sensitivities of the first and the second moment of bank stock return distribution to the short‐term and long‐term interest rates and their respective volatilities. Three portfolios are formed representing the money center banks, large banks, and small banks, respectively. Estimation and testing of hypotheses are carried out for each of the three portfolios separately. The sample includes daily data over the 1988‐2000 period. Several hypotheses are tested within the multivariate GARCH specification. These include the hypotheses of: (i) insensitivity of bank stock return to the changes in the short‐term and long‐term interest rates, (ii) insensitivity of bank stock returns to the changes in the volatilities of short‐term and long‐term interest rates, and (iii) insensitivity of bank stock return volatility to the changes in the short‐term and long‐term interest rate volatilities. The findings indicate that short‐term and long‐term interest rates and their volatilities do exert significant and differential impacts on the return generation process of the three bank portfolios. The magnitudes and the direction of the effect are model‐specific namely that they depend on whether the short‐term or the long‐term interest rate level is included in the mean return equation. These findings have implications on bank hedging strategies against the interest rate risk, regulatory decisions concerning risk‐based capital requirement, and investor’s choice of a portfolio mix.