There has been a long debate about whether speculators are stabilizing or not. We consider a model where speculators have a stabilizing role in normal times, but may also provoke large risk panics. The very feature that makes arbitrageurs liquidity providers in normal times, namely their...

Herd behavior is often viewed as a significant threat for the stability and effciency of financial markets. This paper sheds new light on the relevance of herd behavior for observed correlation of trades. We introduce numerical simulations of a herd model to derive theory-guided predictions...

Regulators often set value-at-risk (VaR) constraints to limit the portfolio risk of institutional investors. For some investors, notably pension funds, the VaR constraint is enforced over a horizon which is significantly shorter than the investment horizon of the investor. Our paper aims to...

I provide evidence that fund managers who overweight firms with the most differentiated products ('monopolies') exhibit a superior risk-adjusted performance. This is consistent with information advantages due to a better understanding of qualitative information on a firm's competitive...

In order to shed light on the "black box" of institutional equity investing in a systematic manner, I conducted a broadly based questionnaire which received a large response from German mutual fund companies. The survey asked fund managers for their basic views and practices and for insights...

In this paper, we present the results of an online questionnaire among private German mutual fund investors. In an exploratory nature, we empirically analyze the differences between three groups: sustainable investors, conventional investors that are either generally interested or those that are...

We conduct a detailed analysis of investors in successful initial coin offerings (ICOs). The average ICO has 4,700 contributors. The median participant contributes small amounts and many investors sell their tokens before the underlying product is developed. Large presale investors obtain tokens...

Analysis of required expected return disclosures by public pension funds in individual asset classes reveals a reliance on past performance in setting return expectations. These extrapolative expectations operate through the expected risk premium and occur across all risky asset classes. Pension...

This paper contrasts the investment behavior of different financial institutions in debt securities as a response to past returns. For identification, I use unique security-level data from the German Micro-database Securities Holdings Statistics. Banks and investment funds respond in a...

In this study, an attempt has been made to find out why investors still prefer broker-sold fund over direct-sold fund despite the superior performance of the latter. We find the sensitivity of funds flow in selected direct-sold funds and broker-sold funds in India. We do not find any evidence...