Minority shareholdings have been on the regulatory agenda of competition authorities for some time. Recent empirical studies, however, draw attention to a new, thought provoking theory of harm: common ownership by institutional investors holding small, parallel equity positions in several...

This paper documents that mutual fund managers who experience distress in one fund tend to subsequently take on more risk in other funds they manage. Specifically, portfolio managers decrease the cash holdings and increase the systematic risk component in their linked funds. This increased...

Many pension funds have a mismatch between assets and liabilities, taking more risks than securing liabilities implies. This puts fixed claims of retirees at risk. For the cases with and without macro-risk, this paper analyses the implications of this asset-liability mismatch for welfare,...

We investigate the leverage of hedge funds using both time-series and cross-sectional analysis. Hedge fund leverage is counter-cyclical to the leverage of listed financial intermediaries and decreases prior to the start of the financial crisis in mid-2007. Hedge fund leverage is lowest in early...

The global trend towards tighten regulation of financial institutions and the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) may hasten the unwinding of cross-shareholdings in Japan, and there are signs that this is already happening. Finding buyers for such shares is therefore a...

According to theory, institutional investors face both risk management and risk shifting incentives. This paper assesses the relevance of these conflicting incentives for Dutch pension funds and insurance firms over the period 1995-2009. Using a unique and extended dataset, we observe a...

This paper develops a general continuous-time framework for defining optimal corporate pension policy. Interactions between the firm's optimal investment and financing policies and the defined benefit pension plan optimal portfolio strategy are studied. We prove that the three decision rules are...

According to theory, institutional investors face both risk management and risk shifting incentives. This paper assesses the relevance of these conflicting incentives for Dutch pension funds and insurance firms over the period 1995-2009. Using a unique and extended dataset, we observe a...

The financial and economic crisis had a profound impact on the financial position of pension funds in most countries. Whilst the magnitude of these losses is primarily related to the severity of the crisis, it appears that shortcomings in the implementation of investment strategies significantly...

We investigate behavior of optimal hedge fund leverage in a fund that has a compensation contract with high-water mark and hurdle rate provisions. A risk neutral fund manager can continuously reallocate assets while she obtains management and performance fees in discrete time moments. We find...