This study shows how price limit rules, intended to stabilize markets, inadvertently distort price dynamics by fostering strategic speculation. Through a dynamic rational expectations model, we demonstrate that price limits induce post limit-up price jumps by impeding full information incorporation, enabling speculators to artificially push prices to upper bounds and exploit uninformed traders. The model predicts two distinct patterns: (1) stocks closing at price limits exhibit positive overnight returns followed by long-term reversals, and (2) stocks retreating from upper bounds suffer sharp reversals with partial recovery. Empirical analysis confirms these predictions. A natural experiment from China’s 2020 GEM reform —- which widened the price limit -— further provides causal evidence that relaxed limits mitigate speculative distortions.

This paper addresses the dynamic tail risk in price-limited financial markets. We propose a novel censored autoregressive conditional Fr´echet model with a fiexible evolution scheme for the time-varying parameters, which allows deciphering the impact of historical information on tail risk from the viewpoint of different risk preferences. The proposed model can well accommodate many important empirical characteristics, such as thick-tailness, extreme risk clustering, and price limits. The empirical analysis of the Chinese stock market reveals the effectiveness of our model in interpreting and predicting time-varying tail behaviors in price-limited equity markets, providing a new tool for financial risk management.

This paper investigates how noise trading behavior is influenced by limited attention. As the daily price limit rules of the Chinese stock market provide a scenario for the exhibition of salient payoffs, speculators elevate prices to attract noise traders into the market. Utilizing a series of distraction events stemming from mobile games as exogenous shocks to investors’ attention, we find that the gambler-like behavior, termed as “Hitting game” is crowded out. Consistent with our attention mechanism, indicators such as trading volume decline in response to these game shocks.

We analyze the possible effect of price limit to informed traders’ behavior and propose three hypotheses caused by price limit. Then comprehensively using the event study method and comparative grouping method, we empirically exams the performance of price limit in China’s stock market. Our finding is that price limit policy will bring significant effect to the trading behavior of insiders, which means price limit policy will impede the fulfillment of insiders’ trading activities and delay equilibrium price discovery.