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...

We examine the influence on managerial risk taking of incentives due to employment risk and due to compensation. Our empirical investigation of the risk taking behavior of mutual fund managers indicates that managerial risk taking crucially depends on the relative importance of these incentives....

We examine the extent of the Status Quo Bias (SQB) in a real-world repeated decision situation. Individuals who are subject to a SQB tend to choose an alternative that was chosen previously (i.e. their status quo), even if it is not the optimal choice any more. We examine the US equity mutual...

Due to a lack of data availability, numerous empirical studies on mutual fund flows (e.g. Sirri/Tufano (1998)) analyze synthetically derived flow measures. We show how good these measures can explain actual flows. We compare the measures suggested in the literature with the actual net-flows of...

This paper examines the influence of the position of a fund within its family on its subsequent net-inflows. Our empirical study of the US equity mutual fund market shows that reaching a top position within the family leads to large inflows. These inflows accrue beyond those expected, given the...

This paper studies the flow-performance relationship of three different investor groups in mutual funds: Households, financial corporations, and insurance companies and pension funds, establishing the following findings: Financial corporations have a strong tendency to chase past performance and...