We shed new light on the corporate governance role of institutional investors in markets where concentrated ownership and business groups are prevalent. When companies have controlling shareholders, institutional investors, as minority shareholders, can play only a limited role in corporate...

This paper examines the role of credit rating agencies in the subprime crisis that triggered the 2007-08 financial turmoil. The focus of the paper is on two aspects of ratings that contributed to the boom and bust of the market for asset-backed securities: rating inflation and coarse information...

Most stock exchange regulators around the world reacted to the 2007-2009 crisis by imposing bans or regulatory constraints on short-selling. Short-selling restrictions were imposed and lifted at different dates in different countries, often applied to different sets of stocks and featured...

We present a model in which issuers of asset backed securities choose to release coarse information to enhance the liquidity of their primary market, at the cost of reducing secondary market liquidity or even causing it to freeze. The degree of transparency is inefficiently low if the social...

Exploring the period since the inception of the euro, we show that secondary-market yields on Italian public debt increase in anticipation of auctions of new issues and decrease after the auction, while no or a smaller such effect is present for German public debt. However, these yield movements...

Using a dataset comprising almost all equity and bond funds in existence in 1996, we find that fund providers shift advertising and distribution expenses via so-called 12b-1 fees onto fund shareholders. It is further shown that bonds funds with 12b-1 fees are more risky, while having similar...

This paper re-examines the incentives of mutual fund managers arising from investor flows. We provide evidence that the convexity of the flow-performance relationship varies with economic activity. We show that the effect is economically large and is not driven by abnormal years. We test two...

We hypothesize that trust plays an important role in affecting the activeness and effectiveness of the global mutual fund industry. Empirically, trust is positively associated with the activeness of domestic funds, whereas for internationals mutual funds conducting cross-border investments...

The early stage of the recent financial crisis was marked by large value losses for bank stocks. This paper identifies the equity funds most affected by this valuation shock and examines its consequences for the non-financial stocks owned by the respective funds. We find that (i) ownership links...