Effects of short-selling regulations on overpricing and liquidity in the Malaysian stock market

• Main Authors: Xie, Alicia Xinrong, Huang, Tai Lun, Lim, Wei Qin
• Other Authors: Lau Sie Ting
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Business
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/51589
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This report investigates the effects of short-selling regulations in the Malaysian equity market on market liquidity and overpricing. Our results indicate that during a financial crisis, short-sale constraints will not support stock prices, and instead lead to lower abnormal returns. This disproves our hypothesis that short-sale constraints lead to stock overpricing during a financial crisis. However, shortable stocks earn lower abnormal returns in general, indicating that short-sale constraints do not support stock prices only in periods of financial crisis. Our results, using bid-ask spread and intra-day volatility indicate that short-sale constraints lead to reduced market liquidity during both periods of financial crisis and pre-financial crisis. This supports the hypothesis that short-selling constraints prevent pessimistic investors from trading on the stocks, which lead to lower trading volume and liquidity.