Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

4940

Xiaohu Deng

Date

2017

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Business Administration

Concentration

Finance

Committee Chair

Sandra Mortal

Committee Member

Christine Jiang

Committee Member

Thomas McInish

Committee Member

David Kemme

Abstract

This dissertation presents three papers that examine the real effects of market frictions such as short selling constraints, and also informed trading in put option and short selling markets. Specifically, first two essays examine the positive externalities of short selling, and paper 3 examines the informational patterns of short selling and put option trading and interactions between both trading activities.Essay 1 studies the real effects of short selling constraints on stock prices, and corporate investment. To do so, I exploit world-wide regulatory interventions to permit short selling. I find that reducing short selling constraints causes stock prices and crash risk to drop, and price efficiency to improve. Corporate investment also drops and is accompanied by a drop in debt and equity issues. Investment becomes more responsive to growth opportunities. My results suggest that short selling constraints can alleviate distortions in stock prices and corporate investment. My results are consistent with the notion that stakeholders infer information from stock prices and adjust investment accordingly.Essay 2 examines whether short selling reduces politically motivated bad news hoarding. I examine the stock price behavior of Chinese public firms around two highly visible political events - meetings of the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party and Two Sessions (The National People’s Congress Conference and The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference) from 2002-2014, and find that political bad news hoarding has been reduced after short selling becomes available. I establish causality by relying on a difference-in-differences approach based on a controlled experiment of short selling regulation changes in China. I also find this reduction in bad news hoarding to be more pronounced in firms with stronger politicalconnection (higher state ownership and larger size) and higher accounting opacity, which further confirms our finding. This study sheds new light on the real effects of short sellers on political impact on capital market.Essay 3 identifies the informational patterns of short sales and option trades. Using VAR and calculating Impulse Response Functions, I find that short selling in general contains more information than put option trading, and put option trading has limited substitution effect.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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