We explore the trading decisions of equity mutual funds during ten periods of extreme market uncertainty. We find that mutual funds reduced their aggregate holdings of illiquid stocks. Exploring the drivers behind this result reveals that this is mainly driven by larger withdrawals from funds...

Prior studies indicate that institutional investors are informed, in the sense that their trades predict price changes. In this study we show that return predictive ability of institutions arises (after controlling for size, book-to-market, and momentum) mainly from institutional sales of...

We examine the relationship between portfolio risk and equity returns over different investment horizons of institutional investors. Compared to long-term institutions, portfolios held by short-term institutions exhibit higher factor loadings in market, size, and momentum. In particular, they...

The recent financial crisis offered an interesting opportunity to analyze the markets'; behavior in a high-volatility framework. In this paper, we analyzed the price discovery process of the Italian banks’ Credit Default Swap (CDS) spreads through the Merton model, extended with the inclusion...

Risk parity is an asset allocation strategy designed so each asset class contributes equally to overall portfolio risk (as measured by volatility). While risk parity offers potential advantages, its success hinges on key assumptions and a favorable environment for bonds. Like the traditional...

Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) – tradeable investments that provide a return linked to an underlying index or basket of assets – are likely the most successful financial product since the 2008 crisis. Over the last decade they've experienced remarkable growth. Yet these products may also be...

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...

We document a strong co-movement between the VIX, the stock market option-based implied volatility, and monetary policy. We decompose the VIX into two components, a proxy for risk aversion and expected stock market volatility (“uncertainty”), and analyze their dynamic interactions with...

The VIX, the stock market option-based implied volatility, strongly co-moves with measures of the monetary policy stance. When decomposing the VIX into two components, a proxy for risk aversion and expected stock market volatility (“uncertainty”), we find that a lax monetary policy decreases...

In the last few years, regulating agencies of many countries, following recommendations of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, have compelled financial institutions to maintain minimum capital requirements to cover market and credit risks. The capital charge to cover market risk is a...