The interplay between investors' demand and providers' incentives has shaped the evolution of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). While early ETFs offered diversification at low cost, later ETFs track niche portfolios and charge high fees. Strikingly, over their first five years, specialized ETFs lose...

We build a moral hazard model to study incentives of financial intermediaries (shortly, bankers) facing a leverage-insurance trade-off in their investment choice. We demonstrate that the choice is affected by two recent transformations of the financial ecosystem bankers inhabit: (i) the rise of...

Investment is no longer a matter of individual savers directly choosing which shares or bonds to buy. Rather, most of their money flows through a "chain": an often extended sequence of intermediaries. What goes on in that chain is of huge importance: The world's investment managers, who are now...