We develop a dual-layered agency model to study blockholder monitoring by activist funds that compete for investor flow. Competition for flow affects the manner in which activist funds govern as blockholders. In particular, funds inflate short-term performance by increasing payouts financed by...

We investigate how business ties with portfolio firms influence mutual funds’ proxy voting using a comprehensive dataset spanning 2003 to 2011. In sharp contrast to the prior literature, we show that the proxy voting of mutual funds is significantly influenced by their business ties with...

Publicly traded corporations are a¤ected by a core agency problem: managers pay the full cost of e¤ort in running the corporations but shareholders enjoy most of the bene?ts. When ownership is dispersed individual shareholders have little incentive to monitor managers and little ability to...

In this paper we develop a simple theoretical model to analyze the impact of institu- tional herding on asset prices. A growing empirical literature has come to the intriguing conclusion that institutional herding positively predicts short-term returns but nega- tively predicts long-term...

Recent studies show that single-quarter institutional herding positively predicts short-term returns. Motivated by the theoretical herding literature, which emphasizes endogenous persistence in decisions over time, we estimate the effect of multi-quarter institutional buying and selling on stock...

Mutual funds hold large blocks of shares in many major corporations. Practitioners and regulators alike have been concerned that mutual funds use their proxy votes in a promanagement manner in order to garner lucrative pensions administration contracts, thus hindering shareholder value. Such...

We study how the presence of multiple participation opportunities coupled with individual learning about payoffs affects the ability of agents to coordinate efficiently in global coordination games. Two players face the option to invest irreversibly in a project in one of many rounds. The...

On 28-29 June 2007, the Financial Markets Group organised a conference covering topics under all three themes of its title, 'Cycles, Contagion and Crises', from the perspective of both developed and emerging economies.

What are the equilibrium features of a market where a sizeable portion of traders face career concerns? This question is central to our understanding of Þnancial markets that are increasingly dominated by institutional investors. We construct a model of delegated portfolio management that...