Regulation SHO Research Articles

Reply to 'The Reg SHO Reanalysis Project: Reconsidering Fang, Huang and Karpoff (2016) on Reg SHO and Earnings Management' by Black et al. (2019)

In a 2016 paper (Fang, Huang, and Karpoff, 2016), we report that firms exposed to an increase in the prospect of short selling during the Reg SHO pilot program have lower discretionary accruals during the pilot period. Black, Desai, Litvak, Yoo, and Yu (2019, hereafter, BDLYY) argue that this result is not replicable. We show that BDLYY’s claim is incorrect. The accruals result previously was replicated in papers by Massa, Zhang, and Zhang (2015) and Heath, Ringgenberg, Samadi, and Werner (2019), and is easily replicable using data and code that we have shared widely since 2014 – including with the BDLYY team in 2015 – and that we recently posted publicly. The accruals result also is robust to a wide range of specification changes, including those implied by the BDLYY paper, which include: various measures of performance-matched discretionary accruals and total accruals; using our original 2012 Compustat data or currently available 2019 Compustat data; including both firm and year fixed effects; including or excluding other covariates in the difference-in-differences (DiD) tests; and using unbalanced rather than balanced panels. We conjecture that BDLYY’s results are inconsistent with prior results because they rely partly on non-standard accruals measures and/or use samples that differ from those used by Fang et al. (2016), Massa et al. (2015), and Heath et al. (2019). We conclude by discussing two theoretical concerns. First, we reiterate that an observed increase in short selling during the Reg SHO period is neither necessary nor sufficient to establish that the prospect of short selling has a disciplinary effect on earnings management, as managers’ endogenous adjustments affect short sellers’ opportunities and observed short selling. Second, we discuss a concern that the Reg SHO change appears to be too small to explain a wide range of firm outcomes, as recent empirical findings suggest.

Firm Trustworthiness and Bank Loan Pricing

Using a novel dataset of firm-level perceived trustworthiness from the news media and social media, we find that lending banks charge significantly higher loan spread on firms with lower trustworthiness. Loans to these firms also tend to have shorter loan maturities, more financial covenants, and higher likelihoods of requiring collateral. We further use the Regulation SHO Pilot program as an exogenous variation and find that the effects of trustworthiness are reduced when pilot firms are better disciplined by short sellers. That is, banks have relied less on soft information like trustworthiness when the overall information and governance environments regarding the borrowing firms are improved. Last, firm trustworthiness effects are stronger for firms with high corruption culture, weak corporate governance, and higher information asymmetry. Collectively, our results suggest that perceived firm trustworthiness from the stakeholders conveys valuable credit quality information to bank loan lenders.

Do Corporate Managers Learn from Short Sellers? Evidence from A Randomized Experiment

We examine how the exemption of short-sale uptick tests due to the Regulation SHO pilot program affects managers’ decisions to abandon value-reducing acquisition attempts. We find that when deciding whether to abandon value-reducing acquisition attempts during the pilot program, managers of pilot firms, whose stocks are less subject to short selling impediments, are more sensitive to stock price changes than managers of nonpilot firms. We find no difference in managers’ sensitivity prior to nor post the program. These results suggest that, despite managers’ repugnance toward short sellers, they learn more from stock price changes when short sellers are less impeded.

Short Selling and Tax Disclosure: Evidence from Regulation SHO

We use a regulatory shock to examine the extent to which the prospect of short selling affects tax disclosure. From May 2005 to August 2007, the SEC initiated a pilot program under Regulation SHO, which temporarily exempted one-third of the firms in the Russell 3000 index from short sale price tests, reducing the cost of short selling of pilot firms. We predict and find that before the pilot program, the disclosure attributes of the income tax footnotes of pilot firms are similar to non-pilot firms. During the pilot program, the readability of the income tax footnotes increases for pilot firms, and the choice of words describing tax activities changed for tax sensitive pilot firms. In further tests, we observe a stronger effect among pilot firms led by senior executives whose stock and option portfolio is more sensitive to changes in stock price. After the pilot program ends, the differences between pilot and non-pilot firms disappear. Overall, the results suggest that the prospect of short selling affects tax disclosure.

Do firms use corporate social responsibility to insure against stock price risk? Evidence from a natural experiment

AbstractResearch SummaryTo examine whether firms use corporate social responsibility (CSR) to insure against stock price risk, we exploit an exogenous shock in stock price risk associated with Regulation SHO whereby the SEC randomly selected pilot firms for which the uptick restriction on short sales no longer applied. A difference‐in‐differences test reveals that pilot firms increased CSR more than nonpilot firms and that in particular they reduced CSR concerns and increased CSR that impacts stakeholders involved in direct resource exchange. We also find that pilot firm CSR reduced short positions against them and that the effect is stronger for CSR concerns and CSR that impacts directly connected stakeholders. Overall, we document a causal effect of stock price risk on managerial incentives to invest in CSR for risk management.Managerial SummaryCorporate social responsibility has many purported benefits, one of which is that it can insure against the adverse stock price effects of negative events. But do managers purposefully use CSR in this way and do such investments provide intended insurance‐like benefits? By taking advantage of a natural experiment where a randomly selected set of pilot firms were exposed to elevated short‐sale risk unleashed by the SEC regulation, we find evidence that they do. Once the SEC initiated the regulatory change, firms that faced greater risk increased CSR more than firms that did not. In addition, increased CSR lowered short interests in pilot firms' stocks and this reduction is attributable to the insurance‐like effect of CSR rather than simply prevention of adverse events.A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/zajeSbhlwhc

Squeezing the Shorts in Small Cap Stocks

In the summer of 2018 the shares of New Concept Energy and Avalon Holdings increased more than 500% and then fell back down without any news or rumours about the companies. Using court documents we reconstruct the trades by an alleged manipulator, we analyze his strategic trading behavior and how the market reacted to his trades. We find that the market on average was not able to identify the alleged manipulator’s trades and that his trading costs were lower than those of the other market participants. Consistent with Allen and Gale (1992) we find that the manipulator exhibits the same behavior as informed investors in Collin-Dufresne and Fos (2015), Kacperczyk and Pagnotta (2018), Garriott and Riordan (2019). We argue that Regulation SHO mandatory settlement deadline easily binds for small-cap stocks, making manipulation in these stocks more likely.

What Happens When Stocks are Added to the Reg. SHO Threshold Security List?

This research project aimed to discover what happens to stocks when they’re being admitted to the NASDAQ Regulation SHO threshold list. Does appearance on the list scare off potential buyers, driving prices lower and ushering a new bearish trend? Or, does it attract buyers, causing stocks to exhibit a mean-reverting behavior? Using the daily NASDAQ Regulation SHO (Reg SHO) threshold lists and daily stock price data from Yahoo! Finance, I set off to find that out.

Reusing Natural Experiments

After a natural experiment is first used, other researchers often reuse the setting, examining different outcome variables. We use simulations based on real data to illustrate the multiple hypothesis testing problem that arises when researchers reuse natural experiments. We then provide guidance for future inference based on popular empirical settings including difference-in-differences regressions, instrumental variables regressions, and regression discontinuity designs. When we apply our guidance to two extensively studied natural experiments, business combination laws and the Regulation SHO pilot, we find that many results that were statistically significant using single hypothesis testing do not survive corrections for multiple hypothesis testing.

Short-sale constraints and stock price crash risk: Causal evidence from a natural experiment

We examine the relation between short-sale constraints and stock price crash risk. To establish causality, we take advantage of a regulatory change from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)’s Regulation SHO pilot program, which temporarily lifted short-sale constraints for randomly designated stocks. Using Regulation SHO as a natural experiment setting in which to apply a difference-in-differences research design, we find that the lifting of short-sale constraints leads to a significant decrease in stock price crash risk. We further investigate the possible underlying mechanisms through which short-sale constraints affect stock price crash risk. We provide evidence suggesting that lifting of short-sale constraints reduces crash risk by constraining managerial bad news hoarding and improving corporate investment efficiency. The results of our study shed new light on the cause of stock price crash risk as well as the roles that short sellers play in monitoring managerial disclosure strategies and real investment decisions.

Short-Sale Constraints and Options Trading: Evidence from Reg SHO

We examine the effects of a temporary suspension of short-sale price tests on the options market. Consistent with the notion that put option trading substitutes for short selling, we find a significant reduction in put option volume. In addition, pressure on put option prices significantly declines, violations of the put-call parity become significantly less frequent, and option volume becomes less informed. Our findings add clarity to a long-standing debate on whether investors use options to circumvent equity short-selling restrictions.

Pre-Analysis Plan for the REG SHO Reanalysis Project

This is a pre-analysis plan for The Reg SHO Reanalysis Project, in which we will reassess primary results from selected recent accounting and finance papers, which exploit the randomized trial conducted by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from May 2, 2005 to July 6, 2007. As part of this trial, the SEC selected every third stock on the Russell 3000 index, based on trading volume during the year before the experiment was announced, and exempted these firms’ shares from the short-sale uptick rule and the test. Early studies of the experiment found minor effects on trading markets (e.g., SEC Office of Economic Analysis (2007), Diether et al (2009)), and led the SEC to rescind these short-sale restrictions. However, more recently, a large body of research has documented evidence for a wide variety of outcomes from the experiment, including increased open short interest, negative returns, reduced investment, reduced earnings management, increased audit fees, and much more. We undertook this project because we viewed most of these outcomes as implausible, given the modest expected impact of the short-sale restrictions on trading markets, limited publicity about the experiment (with no opposition from the affected firms that we could find), and early research consistent with small effects. In this proposed project, we will reassess three prominent, recent studies: Fang, Huang and Karpoff (2016), Grullon, Michenaud and Weston (2015), and Hope, Hu, and Zhao (2017). This pre-analysis plan provides details on our sample selection and the specific analyses we plan to carry out for the main results found in these three papers.

Short Sellers and Managerial Equity Market Timing

Managers tend to issue equity when a firm is overvalued. Short selling is generally frequent among overvalued firms. By conditioning short selling on firm overvaluation, we show that short selling reduces managerial equity market timing and increases leverage. This moderating impact of short selling on market timing is more pronounced in firms with independent boards and with an increased likelihood of misvaluation, is primarily driven by overvaluation relative to long-run value, and occurs mainly through changes in equity issuances. The analyses that utilize the exogenous shock to the short selling environment from the SEC’s Reg SHO pilot program suggest that these results are causal.

Market Pressure and Multinational Corporations’ Tax-Motivated Decisions: Evidence from an SEC Experiment

We examine the role of capital market pressure in firms' international tax-motivated decisions. We use two exogenous events to identify the relation: the temporary lifting of short selling restrictions for randomly selected pilot firms under SEC Regulation SHO (called Pilot firms) and the repatriation tax holiday under the American Jobs Creation Act that occurred in this time period. We document that the Pilot firms are more likely to respond to the tax holiday only when they have foreign losses or generally do not repatriate foreign earnings. We also find that Pilot firms repatriate more, on average. This evidence is consistent with managers generally facing a conflict between self-serving international investment decisions and value-enhancing tax-motivated investment decisions, but this situation is mitigated by greater monitoring by active short sellers that occurs when short-selling restrictions are absent.

Shorting flows, public disclosure, and market efficiency

Shorting flows remain a significant predictor of negative future stock returns during 2010–2015, when daily short-sale volume data are published in real time. This predictability decays slowly and lasts for a year. Long-term shorting flows are more informative than short-term shorting flows. Indeed, abnormal short-term shorting flows do not predict future returns or anticipate bad news. We find that short sellers exploit prominent anomalies. A comparison with the Regulation SHO data indicates that the predictability is much shorter-term during 2005–2007. Short sellers appear to have shifted from trading on short-term private information to trading on long-term public information that is gradually incorporated into prices.

CEO Confidence Matters: The Real Effects of Short Sale Constraints Revisited

This paper investigates the role of managerial biases in the real effects of limits to arbitrage. In a natural experiment setting with Regulation SHO, we find that the lifting of short sale constraints leads to a significant decrease in CEO confidence for pilot firms, and this result is more pronounced for pilot firms with financial constraints and stronger corporate governance. We further find that the real effects of Regulation SHO documented in the literature are primarily driven by such decrease in CEO confidence. Underconfident CEOs of pilot firms tend to decrease corporate investments, reduce earnings management, and improve social performance and employee relations following the removal of short sale constraints. Overall, we identify CEO confidence as a psychological channel through which capital market frictions influence corporate decisions and CEO investment behavior.

Short Selling and Firms' Disclosure of Bad News: Evidence from Regulation SHO

ABSTRACT As informed traders, short sellers enhance the informativeness of stock prices, especially related to bad news, potentially reducing the benefits and increasing litigation and reputational costs of withholding bad news by managers. We exploit a quasi-natural experimental setting provided by the introduction of SEC regulation SHO (Reg-SHO), which significantly reduced the constraints faced by short sellers for an effectively randomly selected subsample of U.S. firms (pilot firms). Relative to control firms, we find pilot firms increase the likelihood of voluntary bad news management forecasts, provide these forecasts in a more timely manner, and accelerate the release of quarterly bad earnings news. Each of these effects is stronger for subsamples of moderate (compared with extreme) bad news, firms facing high (relative to low) litigation risks, and firms with a forecasting history. Similar effects are not observed for voluntary good news forecasts. A range of robustness tests reinforce our results. JEL Classifications: G14; D22; K22; K41; M40.

Short Sellers and Long-Run Management Forecasts

We examine how short sellers affect long-run management forecasts using a natural experiment (Regulation SHO) that relaxes short-selling constraints on a group of randomly selected firms (referred to as pilot firms). We find that compared to other firms, the pilot firms issue more long-run good news forecasts but do not change the frequency of long-run bad news forecasts. The increase in good news forecasts is greater when the pilot firms have higher quality forecasts, more uncertainty about firm value, or higher manager equity incentives. Overall, these results and the results of additional analyses indicate that the reduction in short-selling constraints and the increase in short-selling threat induce managers to enhance disclosures through more long-run forecasts, primarily in the case of good news, to discourage short sellers.

Strategic Trading As a Response to Short Sellers

We study empirically informed traders' reaction to the presence of short sellers in the market. We find that investors with positive views on a stock strategically slow down their trades when short sellers are present in the same stock. Moreover, they purchase larger amounts to take advantage of the price decline induced by short sellers. Furthermore, they break up their buy trades across multiple brokers, suggesting that they wish to hide from the short sellers. This behavior may impact price discovery, as we find a sizeable reduction of positive information impounding for stocks more exposed to short selling during information sensitive periods. The evidence is confirmed exploiting exogenous variation in short interest provided by the Reg SHO Pilot Program. The findings have relevance for the regulatory debate on the market impact of short selling.

Arbitrage Trading: The Long and the Short of It

We examine net arbitrage trading (NAT) measured by the difference between quarterly abnormal hedge fund holdings and abnormal short interest. NAT strongly predicts stock returns in the cross-section. Across ten well-known stock anomalies, abnormal returns are realized only among stocks experiencing large NAT. Exploiting Regulation SHO, which facilitated short selling for a random group of stocks, we present causal evidence that NAT has stronger return predictability among stocks facing greater limits to arbitrage. We also find large returns for anomalies that arbitrageurs chose to exploit despite capital constraints during the 2007–09 financial crisis. We confirm our findings using daily data. Received September 1, 2016; editorial decision May 28, 2018 by Editor Andrew Karolyi. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

(Presentation Slides) The Causal Effect of Limits to Arbitrage on Asset Pricing Anomalies

We examine the causal effect of limits to arbitrage on 11 well-known asset pricing anomalies using the pilot program of Regulation SHO, which relaxed short-sale constraints for a quasi-random set of pilot stocks, as a natural experiment. We find that the anomalies became weaker on portfolios constructed with pilot stocks during the pilot period. The pilot program reduced the combined anomaly long-short portfolio returns by 72 basis points per month, a difference that survives risk adjustment with standard factor models. The effect comes only from the short legs of the anomaly portfolios. Paper is available here: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2696672.