IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jfinec/v104y2012i3p469-490.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Arbitrage crashes and the speed of capital

Author

Listed:
  • Mitchell, Mark
  • Pulvino, Todd

Abstract

The imminent failure of prime brokers during the 2008 financial crisis caused a sudden decrease in the leverage afforded hedge funds. This decrease resulted from the asymmetrical payoff to rehypothecation lenders—the ultimate financiers, through prime brokers, to hedge funds. Seemingly long-term debt capital became short-term capital creating a duration mismatch between left-hand side arbitrage opportunities and right-hand side liabilities. Consequently, arbitrageurs became unable to maintain similar prices of similar assets. Mispricing magnitudes, and the time required to correct them, reflect the role of arbitrageurs in maintaining accurate prices during normal times and offer an estimate of discounts at which assets transact during crises.

Suggested Citation

  • Mitchell, Mark & Pulvino, Todd, 2012. "Arbitrage crashes and the speed of capital," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 104(3), pages 469-490.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jfinec:v:104:y:2012:i:3:p:469-490
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jfineco.2011.09.002
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X11001991
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jfineco.2011.09.002?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mark Mitchell & Todd Pulvino, 2001. "Characteristics of Risk and Return in Risk Arbitrage," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(6), pages 2135-2175, December.
    2. Markus K. Brunnermeier & Lasse Heje Pedersen, 2009. "Market Liquidity and Funding Liquidity," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(6), pages 2201-2238, June.
    3. Shleifer, Andrei & Vishny, Robert W, 1992. "Liquidation Values and Debt Capacity: A Market Equilibrium Approach," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 47(4), pages 1343-1366, September.
    4. Gromb, Denis & Vayanos, Dimitri, 2002. "Equilibrium and welfare in markets with financially constrained arbitrageurs," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(2-3), pages 361-407.
    5. Mark Mitchell & Todd Pulvino & Erik Stafford, 2002. "Limited Arbitrage in Equity Markets," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 57(2), pages 551-584, April.
    6. Nicolae Gârleanu & Lasse Heje Pedersen, 2011. "Margin-based Asset Pricing and Deviations from the Law of One Price," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 24(6), pages 1980-2022.
    7. Stein, Jeremy C., 1992. "Convertible bonds as backdoor equity financing," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 32(1), pages 3-21, August.
    8. Lasse Heje Pedersen & Mark Mitchell & Todd Pulvino, 2007. "Slow Moving Capital," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(2), pages 215-220, May.
    9. Baker, Malcolm & Savasoglu, Serkan, 2002. "Limited arbitrage in mergers and acquisitions," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 64(1), pages 91-115, April.
    10. Malkiel, Burton G, 1977. "The Valuation of Closed-End Investment-Company Shares," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 32(3), pages 847-859, June.
    11. Merton, Robert C, 1987. "A Simple Model of Capital Market Equilibrium with Incomplete Information," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 42(3), pages 483-510, July.
    12. Shleifer, Andrei & Vishny, Robert W, 1997. "The Limits of Arbitrage," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 52(1), pages 35-55, March.
    13. Owen A. Lamont & Richard H. Thaler, 2003. "Can the Market Add and Subtract? Mispricing in Tech Stock Carve-outs," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 111(2), pages 227-268, April.
    14. Gordon Gemmill & Dylan C. Thomas, 2002. "Noise Trading, Costly Arbitrage, and Asset Prices: Evidence from Closed‐end Funds," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 57(6), pages 2571-2594, December.
    15. Green, Richard C., 1984. "Investment incentives, debt, and warrants," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 115-136, March.
    16. Jeffrey Pontiff, 1996. "Costly Arbitrage: Evidence from Closed-End Funds," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 111(4), pages 1135-1151.
    17. Bradley, Michael & Brav, Alon & Goldstein, Itay & Jiang, Wei, 2010. "Activist arbitrage: A study of open-ending attempts of closed-end funds," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(1), pages 1-19, January.
    18. Steven A. Ross, 2002. "Neoclassical Finance, Alternative Finance and the Closed End Fund Puzzle," European Financial Management, European Financial Management Association, vol. 8(2), pages 129-137, June.
    19. Peter Hördahl & Michael R King, 2008. "Developments in repo markets during the financial turmoil," BIS Quarterly Review, Bank for International Settlements, December.
    20. Jefferson Duarte & Francis A. Longstaff & Fan Yu, 2007. "Risk and Return in Fixed-Income Arbitrage: Nickels in Front of a Steamroller?," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 20(3), pages 769-811.
    21. Shumway, Tyler, 2001. "Forecasting Bankruptcy More Accurately: A Simple Hazard Model," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 74(1), pages 101-124, January.
    22. Mr. Manmohan Singh & James Aitken, 2010. "The (Sizable) Role of Rehypothecation in the Shadow Banking System," IMF Working Papers 2010/172, International Monetary Fund.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jiakai Chen & Haoyang Liu & Asani Sarkar & Zhaogang Song, 2020. "Dealers and the Dealer of Last Resort: Evidence from the Agency MBS Markets in the COVID-19 Crisis," Staff Reports 933, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    2. Kapadia, Nikunj & Pu, Xiaoling, 2012. "Limited arbitrage between equity and credit markets," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 105(3), pages 542-564.
    3. Jacobs, Heiko, 2015. "What explains the dynamics of 100 anomalies?," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 57(C), pages 65-85.
    4. He, Zhiguo & Kelly, Bryan & Manela, Asaf, 2017. "Intermediary asset pricing: New evidence from many asset classes," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 126(1), pages 1-35.
    5. Vayanos, Dimitri & Wang, Jiang, 2013. "Market Liquidity—Theory and Empirical Evidence ," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1289-1361, Elsevier.
    6. Wei Xiong, 2013. "Bubbles, Crises, and Heterogeneous Beliefs," NBER Working Papers 18905, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Brunnermeier, Markus K. & Oehmke, Martin, 2013. "Bubbles, Financial Crises, and Systemic Risk," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1221-1288, Elsevier.
    8. Gagnon, Louis & Andrew Karolyi, G., 2010. "Multi-market trading and arbitrage," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 97(1), pages 53-80, July.
    9. Oliver Boguth & Murray Carlson & Adlai Fisher & Mikhail Simutin, 2023. "The Term Structure of Equity Risk Premia: Levered Noise and New Estimates," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 27(4), pages 1155-1182.
    10. Agarwal, Vikas & Fung, William H. & Loon, Yee Cheng & Naik, Narayan Y., 2004. "Risk and return in convertible arbitrage: Evidence from the convertible bond market," CFR Working Papers 04-03, University of Cologne, Centre for Financial Research (CFR).
    11. Andrei Shleifer & Robert Vishny, 2011. "Fire Sales in Finance and Macroeconomics," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 25(1), pages 29-48, Winter.
    12. Nina Boyarchenko & Thomas M. Eisenbach & Pooja Gupta & Or Shachar & Peter Van Tassel, 2018. "Bank-Intermediated Arbitrage," Liberty Street Economics 20181018, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    13. Miguel Antón & Christopher Polk, 2014. "Connected Stocks," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 69(3), pages 1099-1127, June.
    14. Han, Yufeng & Hu, Ou & Huang, Zhaodan, 2023. "A tale of idiosyncratic volatility and illiquidity shocks: Their correlation and effects on stock returns," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).
    15. Jiangze Bian & Zhiguo He & Kelly Shue & Hao Zhou, 2018. "Leverage-Induced Fire Sales and Stock Market Crashes," NBER Working Papers 25040, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. Antonio Falato & Ali Hortaçsu & Dan Li & Chaehee Shin, 2021. "Fire‐Sale Spillovers in Debt Markets," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 76(6), pages 3055-3102, December.
    17. Andrea Pinna, 2015. "Price Formation of Pledgeable Securities," BEMPS - Bozen Economics & Management Paper Series BEMPS26, Faculty of Economics and Management at the Free University of Bozen.
    18. Jingzhi Chen & Charlie X. Cai & Robert Faff & Yongcheol Shin, 2022. "Nonlinear limits to arbitrage," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 42(6), pages 1084-1113, June.
    19. Joni Kokkonen & Matti Suominen, 2015. "Hedge Funds and Stock Market Efficiency," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 61(12), pages 2890-2904, December.
    20. Dagfinn Rime & Andreas Schrimpf & Olav Syrstad, 2022. "Covered Interest Parity Arbitrage," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 35(11), pages 5185-5227.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Arbitrage; Financial crisis; Hedge funds;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G01 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Financial Crises
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates
    • G13 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Contingent Pricing; Futures Pricing

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jfinec:v:104:y:2012:i:3:p:469-490. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/505576 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.