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Against the tide: the commencement of short selling and margin trading in mainland China
Author(s) -
Sharif Saqib,
Anderson Hamish D.,
Marshall Ben R.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
accounting and finance
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.645
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-629X
pISSN - 0810-5391
DOI - 10.1111/acfi.12032
Subject(s) - margin (machine learning) , market liquidity , business , monetary economics , mainland china , china , financial economics , economics , geography , machine learning , computer science , archaeology
China's recent removal of short‐selling and margin trading bans on selected stocks enables testing of the relative effect of margin trading and short selling. We find the prices of the shortable stocks decrease, on average, relative to peer A‐shares and cross‐listed H‐shares, suggesting that short selling dominates margin trading effects. Contrary to the regulators' intention and recent developed market empirical evidence, liquidity declines and bid‐ask spreads increase in these shortable stocks. Consistent with Ausubel (1990), these results imply that uninformed investors avoid the shortable stocks to reduce the risk of trading with informed investors.