This multi-faceted analysis of institutional investment defines fiduciary finance institutions as the third pillar of the financial system, alongside banks and insurers. It documents the role played by investment funds and the money management industry during the recent financial crisis, and...

Pension assets have seen rapid growth world-wide over the past decades, although they suffered large losses during the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. This paper seeks to identify the impact of Asian pension funds on selected key transmission mechanisms from pension reform to financial...

This paper proposes a novel approach to determine whether mutual funds time the market. The proposed approach builds on a heterogeneous agent model, where investors switch between cash and stocks depending on a certain switching rule. This represents a more flexible, intuitive, and parsimonious...

We examine the effect of low interest rates on bond portfolio and market allocations by all institutional investors and households across all bond types in Germany at the security-level for 2005-2016. We find that―in contrast to banks―non-banks tilt bond portfolios significantly towards...

We document a novel channel through which coordinated trading exerts externalities on financial markets. We study the impact of a financial advisory firm that recommends frequent reallocations between equity and bond funds to Chilean pension investors. The recommendations generate large and...

This study assesses the effect of fund-level and systemic factors on the performance of mutual funds in the context of changing market conditions. A Markov regime-switching model is used to analyze the performance of 33 South African equity mutual funds from 2006 to 2019. From the results, fund...

The popularity of passive investing through index mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) has grown substantially over recent years, displacing higher-cost active investment styles. A shift towards passive investing could affect securities markets in two key ways. First, it could result in...

Policymakers often express concern that herding by financial market participants destabilizes markets and increases the fragility of the financial system. This paper provides an overview of the recent theoretical and empirical research on herd behavior in financial markets. It addresses the...

This article provides a new view on the old problem of herding in the global south by foreign portfolio investors. It advocates a liquidity perspective that problematizes the capacity for a herd to form because of the absence of sufficient counterparties willing to trade. Drawing on ethnographic...