Slow Moving Capital
NBER Working Paper No. 12877
We study three cases in which specialized arbitrageurs lost significant amounts of capital and, as a result, became liquidity demanders rather than providers. The effects on security markets were large and persistent: Prices dropped relative to fundamentals and the rebound took months. While multi-strategy hedge funds who were not capital constrained increased their positions, a large fraction of these funds actually acted as net sellers consistent with the view that information barriers within a firm (not just relative to outside investors) can lead to capital constraints for trading desks with mark-to-market losses. Our findings suggest that real world frictions impede arbitrage capital.
This paper was revised on December 16, 2013
Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w12877
Published: Mark Mitchell & Lasse Heje Pedersen & Todd Pulvino, 2007. "Slow Moving Capital," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(2), pages 215-220, May. citation courtesy of
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