Pichhadze (2010) introduced the Market Oriented Blockholder Model (MOBM) as properly describing the ownership pattern in the American equity markets. Under the model, the emerging blockholder in the American equity markets is the institutional investor (II). This poses a challenge to the...

This paper addresses the questions whether European mutual fund managers rely on sell-side analyst information with respect to their investment decisions and whether this behavior impacts fund performance. Based on a sample of over 4,300 European mutual funds and around 1.2 million portfolio...

Pichhadze (2010) introduced the Market Oriented Blockholder Model (MOBM) as properly describing the ownership pattern in the American equity markets. Under the model, the emerging blockholder in the American equity markets is the institutional investor (II). This poses a challenge to the...

The empirical literature on the potential collusive effects of common-ownership relies heavily on financial institution mergers to make causal inferences. I find that more than 85% of newly-formed common-ownership relationships due to such financial institution mergers are no longer...

We argue that a common practice of evaluating portfolio managers relative to a benchmark has real effects. Benchmarking generates additional, inelastic demand for assets inside the benchmark. This leads to a "benchmark inclusion subsidy:" a firm inside the benchmark values an investment project...

I study the effect of a threat of hedge fund activism on corporate investment. I find that managers are less likely to undertake acquisitions when subject to a higher threat of activism. They decrease the number of risky, value-creating acquisitions undertaken by the firm. I present evidence...

We analyze whether institutional investors’ corporate bond holdings are associated with how actively they vote and monitor their equity investments. We document that institutions conduct more governance research and are less likely to follow proxy advisor vote recommendations for companies...

We study the performance of UK PE-backed companies during the COVID-19 pandemic using two methods: a standard difference-in-differences model where we match PE-backed firms to similar, non-PE-backed firms based on pre-pandemic ob-servable firm characteristics, and a novel synthetic...

We study the decisions and performance of managers who are also chair of the board (duality managers). We hypothesize that duality managers take more risky decisions and deliver worse performance than non-duality managers due to reduced level of control and replacement risk. Using the mutual...