It is fair to say that the research on Public Private Partnership (PPP), in particular, on its risk-return profiles, is rare, despite the fact that this form of infrastructure financing has been on the rise during the last two decades in a diverse set of countries. This study aims to fill that...

New Silk Road railways have provided cross-continental rail freight services between China and Eurasian countries since 2011. We examine the impact of being connected to Silk Road railways on the 13 destination countries bilateral trade with China. To address the issue of endogenous placement of...

Large institutional investors own an increasing share of equity markets in the U.S. The implications of this development for financial markets are still unclear. The paper presents novel empirical evidence that ownership by large institutions predicts higher volatility and greater noise in stock...

We exploit the merger between BlackRock and Barclays Global Investors to study how changes in expected ownership concentration affect the investment behavior of funds and the cross-section of stocks worldwide. We find that funds with open-end structures and a large exposure to commonly-held...

This paper investigates the sensitivity of the demand for safe government debt to currency unhedged and hedged excess returns in a sample of US mutual funds. We find evidence of active rebalancing towards government bonds that offer relatively higher returns on an unhedged basis, in particular...

Institutional investments di ffer in several key aspects, including fi nancial sophistication and frequency of monitoring from retail mutual funds. This paper analyzes how this "e ffective governance" impedes tournament behavior. For mutual funds, it has been shown that relative "loser" managers...

We study the impact of the zero lower bound interest rate policy on the industrial organization of the U.S. money fund industry. We find that in response to policies that maintain low interest rates, money funds: change their product offerings by investing in riskier asset classes; are more...

Standard pay-as-you-go pension system is facing long-term and short-term sustainability challenges in several countries. Possible replacement of standard pension system might be in a form of private pension savings. Private pension savings are meaningful only if they provide sufficiently high...