This paper studies one of the potential causes of the financial market bubble of the late 1990s: herding behavior of mutual funds. We show that the incentives contained in the mutual funds' advisory contracts induce managers to overcome their tendency to herd. We argue that investing in bubble...

We examine how shareholder investment horizons influence firms' payout decisions. We find that U.S. firms held by short-term institutional investors have a higher propensity to buybacks shares instead of using dividends. Firm managers seem to respond to the preferred payout policy of investors...

We hypothesize that poor country-level governance, which makes public information less reliable, induces fund managers to increase their use of semi-public information. Utilizing data from international mutual funds and stocks over the 2000-2009 period, we find that semi-public...

We hypothesize that poor country-level governance, which makes public information less reliable, induces fund managers to increase their use of semi-public information. Utilizing data from international mutual funds and stocks over the 2000-2009 period, we find that semi-public...