IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/jhu/papers/574.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

"Shooting the Messenger?" The Impact of Short Sale Bans in Times of Crisis

Author

Listed:
  • Ian Appel
  • Caroline Fohlin

Abstract

We find that the bans on covered short sales, implemented in several countries during the financial crisis of 2008-09 improved market liquidity or at least had a neutral impact; a result we argue could be expected in theory, given a simple variation on the Diamond-Verrechia (1987) model. The result holds for daily data over an extended period as well as for intraday data over various time spans. In contrast to other recent studies, we use American Depository Receipts as the controls in a difference-in-difference analysis encompassing all banned non-U.S. shares with corresponding depository receipts listed in the United States. Furthermore, we find that bans on covered short sales generally succeeded in lowering volatility. Banning short selling is not good policy in normal times, but our findings indicate that such bans might prove useful in (temporarily) stemming liquidity loss during crises.

Suggested Citation

  • Ian Appel & Caroline Fohlin, 2010. ""Shooting the Messenger?" The Impact of Short Sale Bans in Times of Crisis," Economics Working Paper Archive 574, The Johns Hopkins University,Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:jhu:papers:574
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1595003
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Previati, Daniele Angelo & Galloppo, Giuseppe & Aliano, Mauro & Paimanova, Viktoria, 2021. "Why do banks react differently to short-selling bans? Evidence from the Asia-Pacific area and the United States," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 80(C), pages 144-158.
    2. Gary Gorton, 2015. "Stress for Success: A Review of Timothy Geithner's Financial Crisis Memoir," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 53(4), pages 975-995, December.
    3. Gary Gorton & Ellis W. Tallman, 2016. "How Did Pre-Fed Banking Panics End?," Working Papers (Old Series) 1603, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
    4. Fohlin, Caroline & Lu, Zhikun & Zhou, Nan, 2022. "Short sale bans may improve market quality during crises: New evidence from the 2020 Covid," SAFE Working Paper Series 365, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE.
    5. Daniele Angelo Previati & Giuseppe Galloppo & Mauro Aliano & Viktoriia Paimanova, 2017. "Why Do US Banks React Differently to Short Selling Bans?," Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Banking and Financial Institutions, in: Giusy Chesini & Elisa Giaretta & Andrea Paltrinieri (ed.), The Business of Banking, chapter 0, pages 79-108, Palgrave Macmillan.
    6. Seungho Lee, 2022. "The COVID-19 pandemic, short-sale ban, and market efficiency: empirical evidence from the European equity markets," Journal of Asset Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 23(2), pages 156-171, March.
    7. Jani Saastamoinen & Niko Suhonen, 2013. "Were the European short selling bans of 2011 effective?," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 33(3), pages 1847-1851.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jhu:papers:574. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Humphrey Muturi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dejhuus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.