The $13.5 bn acquisition of Barclays Global Investors by BlackRock, that creates the world’s biggest asset manager, puts again fundamental questions. Can dimensions favout efficiency, overcoming complexity and risks? While other important topics are related to the active or passive style of...

The past few decades have seen a major shift from centralized to decentralized investment management by pension fund sponsors, despite the increased coordination problems that this brings. Using a unique, proprietary dataset of pension sponsors and managers, we identify two secular...