We study the benefits of opening up local equity markets to foreign institutional investors using data on Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors (QFIIs) in China around the reform floating non-tradable shares. We find evidence supporting the view (Stulz (1999)) that as “outsiders,”...

This paper examines the relationship between institutional holdings and dividend policy by jointly considering investment style and firms' growth opportunities. It helps to resolve the apparent low-dividend-preference puzzle in which institutional investors have higher holdings in...

We examine the role of institutional investors underlying post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD). Our results show that while institutional investors generally herd on earnings news, such correlated trading among institutions does not eliminate or reduce market underreaction to earnings...

There has been a steady increase in institutional ownership of penny stocks over the past decades. Nevertheless, we show that penny stocks bought by institutional investors significantly underperform other penny stocks in subsequent four quarters. This poor performance is mainly driven by...