Asset Pricing with Costly Short Sales

Abstract

We study a dynamic equilibrium model with costly-to-short stocks and heteroge- neous beliefs. The closed-form solution to the model shows that costly short sales drive a wedge between the valuation of assets that promise identical cash flows but are subject to different trading arrangements. Specifically, we show that the price of an asset is given by the risk-adjusted present value of future cash flows which include both dividends and an endogenous lending yield. This formula implies that returns satisfy a modified capital asset pricing model and sheds light on recent findings about the explanatory power of lending fees in the cross-section of returns. In particular, we show that once returns are appropriately adjusted for lending fees, stocks with low and high shorting costs offer similar risk-return tradeoffs.

Keywords: Dynamic equilibrium, heterogeneous beliefs, Securities lending, Shorting costs

JEL Classification: D51, D52, G11, G12