Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis Vol. 6 No. 5 1971
The Effect of Short Selling and Margin Requirements in Perfect Capital Markets
Abstract
It is well known that present institutional arrangements do not permit investors to use the proceeds of short sales to finance the purchase of other stocks. On the contrary, investors must place the proceeds of short sales in escrow, and they must also affirmatively invest (deposit) an additional amount equal to margin requirements (which may be as much as 100 percent) of the “proceeds” of the short sales. These escrowing and depositing requirements together will be referred to as “short-sales escrowing requirements.” These escrowing requirements not only involve forced or “by-product” holdings of the (nominally) riskless asset, they also change the structure of the investor's wealth constraint by requiring the substitution of absolute values for the natural number of shares when short sales are made.
- DOI
- 10.2307/2329855
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 1173
- Sources
- openalex crossref