The rise of social media has encouraged guru dreams because of the low entry barrier and highly skewed distribution of public attention that characterize social media. The pursuit of guru status, however, may be achieved through information provision or cheap talk, and competition inherent to...

We study the decisions of international asset managers to outsource portfolio management of their funds and we link these decisions to market integration. Using a structural model of selfselection, we endogenize the decision to outsource in a comprehensive sample of international mutual funds...

This Paper investigates the impact of ownership patterns on the way the firm is monitored, on the liquidity of its shares, and on its stock price. Building on the literature showing that local mutual funds (funds holding geographically close firms) enjoy superior returns due to private...

We focus on an exogenous event that changes the cost of capital of a company – the addition of its stock to the S&P 500 index – and investigate how companies react to it by modifying their corporate financial and investment policies. This allows us to test capital structure theories in an...

We study how organizational complexity affects capital structure and firm value. We measure organizational complexity as the number of layers in the firm's subsidiary structure, and focus on a sample of US firms over the period 1998-2006. We argue that organizational complexity makes the firm...

We study what determines catering through payout policy, and how the ability to cater affects firm policies. We create a catering index, measuring the extent to which the firm caters to its investors' payout preferences. Catering is constrained by market segmentation and dispersion in investor...

We study how information flows within financial conglomerates by analyzing the relationships between mutual funds and banks that belong to the same financial group. We investigate the effect that the lending behavior of affiliated banks has on the portfolio choice of the mutual funds that are...

This paper studies one of the potential causes of the financial market bubble of the late 1990s: herding behavior of mutual funds. We show that the incentives contained in the mutual funds' advisory contracts induce managers to overcome their tendency to herd. We argue that investing in bubble...

This article studies one of the potential causes of the financial market bubble of the late 1990s: the herding behavior of mutual funds. We show that the incentives contained in the mutual funds' advisory contracts induce managers to overcome their tendency to herd. We argue that investing in...

We study the trade-off between liquidity and monitoring implicit in the bank-firm relationship. By virtue of their lending activity, banks have privileged access to inside information about the companies and their monitoring role helps them mitigate the managers' risk-taking behavior. However,...