We estimate 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, we exploit a natural experiment involving a change in a government-imposed...

In Montenegro & Pedraza (2009) we argued that the staggering spread of mobile phones was critical in the reduction of kidnapping rates in Colombia between 2000 and 2008. Handsets provided citizens a fast and cheap tool to communicate with authorities. In this document, using new available data...

I study portfolio choice of strategic fund managers in the presence of a peer-based underperformance penalty. While the penalty generates herding behavior, correlated trading among managers is exacerbated when a strategic setting is considered. The equilibrium portfolios are driven by the least...

This paper summarizes evidence on financial instruments and regulatory approaches to spur private investment in pursuit of the 2030 Sustainable Developments Goals. Starting from a theoretical framework demonstrating that raising the marginal product of capital is the key to crowding in private...

Business groups, which are collections of legally independent companies with a significant amount of common ownership, dominate private sector activity in developing countries. This paper studies information flows within these groups by examining the trading performance of institutional...

Standard sticky information pricing models successfully capture the sluggish movement of aggregate prices in response to monetary policy shocks but fail at matching the magnitude and frequency of price changes at the micro level. This paper shows that in a setting where firms choose when to...

I show that in a setting with costly information processing, strategic complementarity in pricing, by generating planning complementatrities, results in the aggregate price responding slowly to nominal shocks even though individual firm prices change by large amounts in response to idiosyncratic...

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...