The Cost of Short-Selling Liquid Securities

Abstract

Standard models of liquidity argue that the higher price for a liquid security reflects the future benefits that long investors expect to receive. We show that short-sellers can also pay anetliquidity premium if their cost to borrow the security is higher than the price premium they collect from selling it. We provide a model-free decomposition of the price premium for liquid securities into thenetpremiums paid bybothlong investorsandshort-sellers. Empirically, we find that short-sellers were responsible for a substantial fraction of the liquidity premium for on-the-run Treasuries from November 1995 through July 2009.