In his Berkshire Hathaway annual newsletter to investors c.20 years ago, Warren Buffett while discussing the Long Term Capital Management LTCM and Enron collapses, famously called derivatives: "financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially...

Social infrastructure has endured a long period of neglect in most developed and emerging countries, with chronic underinvestment exposed by the coronavirus crisis 2020. The financial crisis 2007/08 led to a slow revival of economic infrastructure policies, and a growing involvement of...

Investment in infrastructure is important to the society and the economy. The focus of the current debates is primarily on economic infrastructure, especially on transport and energy networks. In contrast, investment in social sectors, such as education and health, has so far received...

Integrated capital markets facilitate risk sharing across countries. Lower home bias in financial investments is an indicator of risk sharing. We highlight that existing indicators of equity home bias in the literature suffer from incomplete coverage because they consider only listed equities....

Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) have become active investors on the financial markets. This working paper meets the increasing thirst for information on the investment activities of Sovereign Wealth Funds, their legal environment and the implications on German stock listed corporations. Thus, this...

Emerging markets have grown rapidly over the past two decades, and sovereign and corporate borrowers are increasingly reliant on bond financing. Given widespread concern over what will happen to emerging market bonds as central banks in major advanced economies start to unwind quantitative...

Foreign Institutional Investors is one of the very important source of portfolio capital. Earlier, the capital flow was only among the industrialized economy and the flows towards the developing economies was limited. Foreign Institutional Investors have been playing a key role in the Indian...

We find substantial herding in U.S. corporate bonds among bond fund managers, much higher than that previously documented for the equity market. Herding is generally stronger among illiquid bonds, and buy herding and sell herding are driven by different factors. In particular, sell herding...

We pursue the first large scale investigation of a strongly growing mutual fund type: Islamic funds. Based on an unexplored, survivorship bias adjusted dataset, we analyse the financial performance and investment style of 265 Islamic equity funds from twenty countries. As Islamic funds often...

This study examines the interplay between two major global trends – the growing role of foreign institutional investors (FII) due to global financial liberalization and the embracement of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as an investment ethos – in the world’s second-largest economy....