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...

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...

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...

This paper exploits a novel dataset covering the universe of transactions in the Colombian Stock Exchange to analyze episodes of additions to and deletions from MSCI equity indexes. The analysis finds that additions and deletions have large price effects: the median cumulative abnormal return in...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...