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...

Commercial banks acquire inside information about the firms they lend to. We study the impact of this informationally privileged position on the borrowing firm using a broad panel of U.S. firms over the 1993--2004 period. We measure the strength of the bank-firm relationship by bank-firm...

The literature suggests that while decentralized decision making can allow for greater specialization in an organization, it heightens the cost of coordinating decisions. The mutual fund industry—in particular, sole- and team-managed balanced funds—provides an ideal setting to test the...

We study rights offerings using a sample of 8,238 rights offers announced during 1995-2008 in 69 countries. Although shareholders prefer having the option to trade rights, issuers deliberately restrict tradability in 38% of the offerings. We argue that firms restrict rights trading to avoid the...

We study rights offerings using a sample of 8,238 rights offers announced during 1995-2008 in 69 countries. Although shareholders prefer having the option to trade rights, issuers deliberately restrict tradability in 38% of the offerings. We argue that firms restrict rights trading to avoid the...

We hypothesize that poor country-level governance, which makes public information less reliable, induces fund managers to increase their use of semi-public information. Utilizing data from international mutual funds and stocks over the 2000-2009 period, we find that semi-public...

We study how debt market frictions constraining the ability to replace bank with bond financing during a tightening in bank credit supply affect corporate yield spreads. We document that more inflexible firms suffer bigger increases in bond yield spreads as bank credit supply tightens. Debt...

We investigate whether short sellers are subject to the disposition effect using a novel dataset that allows to identify the weekly closing of short positions. Consistent with the disposition effect, the closing of short sale positions is strongly related to a proxy of Shortsale Capital Gains...

We study the relation between information and fire sales during a crisis. We argue that the reinforcing effect of funding liquidity on market liquidity is weaker when investors have more information about the assets facing sudden price drops (Brunnermeier and Pedersen, 2009). We focus on the...

We investigate whether providers of high frequency news analytics affect the stock market. As identification, we exploit a unique experiment based on differences in news event classifications between different product releases of a major provider of news analytics. We document a causal effect of...