Despite the incentives of incumbent domestic listed corporations (DLCs) in the electricity generation industry, private equity, institutional investors, and foreign corporations have played an outsized role in financing the energy transition. These new entrants are twice as likely to create...

Bank payout policy is strongly affected by regulation and politics, especially for the largest banks. Banks, but not industrial firms, have consistently lower payouts in times of high regulation uncertainty and under democratic presidents. After the Global Financial Crisis, bank regulators'...

We examine the interaction between three kinds of concentrated owners commonly found in an emerging market: family-run business groups, domestic financial institutions, and foreign financial institutions. Using data from India in the early 1990s, we find evidence that domestic international...

Large institutional investors own an increasing share of equity markets. We conjecture that a financial market in which large institutions dominate operates differently than a market populated by smaller independent investors. To support this view, we show that funds within the same family...

Share prices of modern corporations are influenced by the size and structure of boards of directors, large individual and institutional investors, and shareholder voting rights, among other governance features. It is not clear whether the same features mattered historically, given recent...

Does partisan perception shape the flow of international capital? We provide evidence from two settings, syndicated corporate loans and equity mutual funds, to show that ideological alignment with foreign governments affects the cross-border capital allocation by U.S. institutional investors....

Are market experts prone to heuristics, and if so, do they transfer across closely related domains--buying and selling? We investigate this question using a unique dataset of institutional investors with portfolios averaging $573 million. A striking finding emerges: while there is clear evidence...

This paper studies institutional investors' decision-making using novel data from a major proxy advisor. We highlight the significant role of customized proxy advice in shaping shareholders' voting decisions. About 80% of funds receive customized advice, and custom recommendations differ...

In 2017, "The Big Three" institutional investors launched campaigns to increase gender diversity on corporate boards. We estimate that their campaigns led American corporations to add at least 2.5 times as many female directors in 2019 as they had in 2016. Firms increased diversity by...

This paper studies whether green investors can influence corporate greenhouse gas emissions through capital markets, either by divesting their stock and limiting polluters' access to capital, or holding polluters' stock and engaging with management. We focus on public pension funds, classifying...