During the global financial crisis, stressed market conditions led to skyrocketing corporate bond spreads that could not be explained by conventional modeling approaches. This paper builds on this observation and sheds light on time-variations in the relationship between systematic risk factors...

This paper analyzes how newly introduced transparency requirements for short positions affect investors' behavior and security prices. Employing a unique data set, which contains both public positions above and confidential positions below the regulatory disclosure threshold, we offer several...

In times of financial distress, central banks provide unlimited liquidity to avoid fire sales. In response, banks raise their demand for collateral assets, and the short-term scarcity of collateral securities leads to higher prices, the Fire Buy premium. To avoid collateral scarcity, central...

Using a unique data set that contains the complete ownership structure of the German stock market, we study the momentum and contrarian trading of different investor groups. Foreign investors and financial institutions, and especially mutual funds, are momentum traders, whereas private...

Using the exogenous shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, we study how informed market participants evaluate fiscal space. Short-selling activity shifted upon the onset of the pandemic towards companies with low financial flexibility only in countries with limited fiscal space. Among these companies,...

In the light of the recent financial crisis, the discussion on the nature of runs and on the stabilizing role of liquidity holdings has intensified. This paper explores the cash management conducted by German open-end equity funds for the period between 2005 and 2010. Since ownership structures...

Investment funds are highly connected with each other, but also with the broader financial system. In this paper, we quantify potential vulnerabilities arising from funds' connectedness. While previous work exclusively focused on indirect connections (overlapping asset portfolios) between...

Institutional funds have concentrated ownership by a few institutional investors, infrequent outflows and essentially no leverage. Yet using unique granular data on the bond holdings of institutional funds, we show that their trading behavior is strongly procyclical: they actively move into...

Is the asset management sector a source of financial instability? This paper contributes to the debate by performing a macroprudential stress test in order to quantify systemic risks in the mutual fund sector. For this purpose we include the welldocumented flow-performance relationship as an...

This paper provides initial evidence on counterparty risk-mitigation activities of financial institutions on the basis of Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation's (DTCC) proprietary bilateral credit default swap transactions and positions. We show that financial institutions that are active...