The plus operator converts operands to int first and then does the addition. So the result is the int. You need to cast it back to short explicitly because conversions from a "longer" type to "shorter" type a made explicit, so that you don't loose data accidentally with an implicit cast.
As to why int16 is cast to int, the answer is, because this is what is defined in C# spec. And C# is this way is because it was designed to closely match to the way how CLR works, and CLR has only 32/64 bit arithmetic and not 16 bit. Other languages on top of CLR may choose to expose this differently.
