This paper documents significant cross-border effects of the 2014 US money market fund (MMF) reform on MMFs in the euro area. As US-based prime MMFs became less money-like due to the reform, euro area-based prime MMFs received large inflows from foreign investors. These cross-border flows were...

Exploiting a granular dataset of banks' security holdings I assess the impact of unconventional monetary policy on bank lending and security holdings. Using a difference-in-differences regression setup and holding the security composition of each bank constant at its level in January 2014, well...

Mutual fund risk-taking via active portfolio rebalancing varies both in the cross-section and over time. In this paper, I show that the same is true for funds' off- balance sheet risk-taking, even after controlling for on-balance sheet activities. For this purpose, I propose a novel measure of...

We utilize the Eurosystem securities lending facilities as a laboratory to investigate the impact of collateral scarcity on market functioning. The reduction of securities lending fees, implemented in November 2020, provides a natural experiment for our analyses. This policy change results in a...

Using microdata on stock-level lending positions from German mutual funds, we show that active funds use the equity lending market to obtain information about short sale demand. Funds reduce long positions in response to these demand signals, which allows fund managers to front-run public...

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,...

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...

In this paper, we consider models of price-mediated contagion in a banking networkof common asset holdings. For these models, the literature proposed two alternativeclasses of liquidation dynamics:threshold dynamics(banks liquidate their invest-ment portfolios only after they have defaulted),...

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...

Using a unique dataset on the sectoral ownership structure of euro area equity mutual funds, we study how different investor groups contribute to the negative performance externality from large outflows. Investment funds, as holders of mutual funds, are the main contributors to the flow...