Individuals increasingly buy mutual funds via on-line platforms, whose ‘best buy' recommendations heavily influence flows. As intermediaries of mutual funds, platforms provide none of the unobservable interaction or intangible benefits of brokers, and so allow clean tests of the determinants,...

With data from all the leading international investment banks on 220 IPOs raising $160bn, we test the determinants of IPO allocations. We compare investors' IPO allocations with proxies for their information production during the bookbuilding and the broking (and other) revenues those investors...

When investors commit capital to a private equity fund, the money is not immediately invested but is called by the fund manager throughout an investment period of up to five years. This business model allows private equity fund managers to invest the committed capital at their own discretion,...