Inc. was dismissed by a federal court in Arkansas, and upheld by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in March 2009. Pet Quarters alleged the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.'s stock-borrow program resulted in the creation of nonexistent or phantom stock and contributed to the illegal short selling of the company's shares. The court ruled: "In short, all the damages that Pet Quarters claims to have suffered stem from activities performed or statements made by the defendants in conformity with the program's Commission approved rules. We conclude that the district court did not err in dismissing the complaint on the basis of preemption." Pet Quarters' complaint was almost identical to suits against DTCC brought by Whistler Investments Inc. and Nanopierce Technologies Inc. The suits also challenged DTCC's stock-borrow program, and were dismissed. One scholar, in an article published in the New York University Journal of Law and Business, noted that "until a court declares naked short selling as market manipulation as a matter of law and clarifies the issuer's and investor's burdens in proving the occurrence of naked short selling, the practice will continue without a check from the judiciary." Studies A study of trading in initial public offerings by two SEC staff economists, published in April 2007, found that excessive numbers of fails to deliver were not correlated with naked short selling. The authors of the study said that while the findings in the paper specifically concern IPO trading, "The results presented in this paper also inform a public debate surrounding the role of short selling and fails to deliver in price formation." In contrast, a study by Leslie Boni in 2004 found correlation between "strategic delivery failures" and the cost of borrowing shares. The paper, which looked at a "unique dataset of the entire cross-section of U.S. equities", credited the initial recognition of strategic delivery fails to Richard Evans, Chris Geczy, David Musto and Adam Reed, and found its review to provide evidence consistent with their hypothesis that "market makers strategically fail to deliver shares when borrowing costs are high." A study by Autore, Boulton, and Braga-Alves examined stock returns around delivery failures between 2005 and 2008 and found evidence consistent with a positive link between delivery failures and borrowing costs. An April 2007 study conducted for Canadian market regulators by Market Regulation Services Inc. found that fails to deliver securities were not a significant problem on the