Empirical evidence indicates that trades by institutional investors have sizable effects on asset prices, generating phenomena such as index effects, asset-class effects and others. It is difficult to explain such phenomena within standard representative-agent asset pricing models. In this...

We study the impact of evaluating the performance of asset managers relative to a benchmark portfolio on firms' investment, merger and IPO decisions. We introduce asset managers into an otherwise standard asset pricing model and show that firms that are part of the benchmark are effectively...