Financially constrained firms can use hedging to lower the risk of financial distress. However, spending scarce resources on hedging exacerbates the underinvestment problem of these firms. We develop a model in which this cost of hedging is traded off against a reduction in the risk of being...

I examine the implications of the sharp contraction of loan supply from nonbank institutional investors from 2008 through 2010 by comparing firms with and without institutional loans at the onset of the financial crisis. Despite large subsequent reductions in institutional loan balances, there...

Firms with different environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scores can have different costs of capital, either because ESG scores help forecast future cash flows – the fundamental channel – or because investors have non-pecuniary preferences for high-ESG-score assets – the preference...

I investigate whether or not the multi-period trades of financial institutions cause mispricing in the stock market. After controlling for the magnitude and trends in institutional trades, I find evidence consistent with institutional trades pushing prices away from fundamentals. Stocks heavily...

Do asset managers reach for yield because of competitive pressures in a low-rate environment? I propose a tournament model of money market funds (MMFs) to study this issue. When funds care about relative performance, an increase in the risk premium leads funds with lower default costs to...

Mutual funds must publish policies announcing how they generally vote on the different ballot items at the shareholder meetings of their portfolio firms. I manually collect 17,000 of these policies for a sample of 29 of the largest U.S. mutual fund families over 2006-2018. I find that voting...

We analyze how the materialization of climate risk in the institutional investors' portfolios spurs a propagation effect on the information content of stock prices. Institutional investors with a relatively high portfolio exposure to disasters divest from disaster-hit stocks, decrease the...

Using survey data we analyze institutional investors' expectations about the future performance of fund managers and the impact of those expectations on asset allocation decisions. We find that institutional investors allocate funds mainly on the basis of fund managers' past performance and of...

We propose a novel way of measuring the equity portfolio-level environmental and social characteristics of a 13F institution (the “sustainability footprint”) and examine the relation between sustainability footprints and risk-adjusted investment performance. The analysis shows that 13F...

A quantum financial approach to finite games of strategy is addressed, with an extension of Nash's theorem to the quantum financial setting, allowing for an entanglement of games of strategy with two-period financial allocation problems that are expressed in terms of: the consumption plans'...