This paper studies credit allocation when government loan programs are distributed by private banks. The study focuses on Brazil, where private lenders can operate in two credit markets: competitive loans with own funding and earmarked loans that rely on government funds to finance firms at...

Active investors often generate inferior returns. Social interactions might exacerbate this tendency, but the causal link between peer effects and active trading is difficult to identify empirically. This paper exploits the exogenous assignment of students to classrooms in a large-scale...

This paper estimates the effects of peer benchmarking by institutional investors on asset prices. To identify trades purely due to peer benchmarking as separate from those based on fundamentals or private information, the paper exploits a natural experiment involving a change in a government...

It is commonly believed that stock prices help firms' managers make more efficient real investment decisions, because they aggregate information about fundamentals that is not otherwise known to managers. This paper identifies a limitation to this view. It shows that if informed traders...

This paper studies the portfolio choice of strategic fund managers in the presence of a peer-based underperformance penalty. Evidence is taken from the Colombian pension fund management industry, where six asset managers are in charge of portfolio allocation for the mandatory contributions of...

This paper studies the trading behavior and performance of foreign investors with different management styles. The analysis uses a comprehensive Colombian data with complete transaction records and unique investor identification, and finds that the aggregate under-performance of foreign...

This paper looks at the impact of members' ability to switch pension fund provider and /or portfolio on the allocation of pension funds to long-term investments. The level of annual turnover in pension fund portfolios was compared with the amount of short-term investments (using government...

Business groups, which are collections of publicly traded companies with significant amount of common ownership, dominate private sector activity in developing countries. This paper studies how information flows within these groups by analyzing the trading behavior of pension fund managers in...