This paper sheds new light on the impact of information risk and market stress on herding of institutional traders from both, a theoretical and an empirical perspective. Using numerical simulations of a herd model, we show that buy and sell herding intensity should increase with information...

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores are the main tool for asset managers in designing and implementing ESG investment strategies. They amalgamate a broad range of fundamentally different factors, creating ambiguity for investors as to the signals of higher or lower ESG scores. We...

This paper evaluates the impact of a screening process based on Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores for an otherwise passive portfolio of investment-grade corporate bonds. The main result is that this filtering leads to a substantial improvement of the targeted ESG score without...

In this paper, we build portfolios with decreasing carbon footprint, which passive investors can use as new Paris-consistent (PC) benchmarks and have the same risk- adjusted returns as business as usual (BAU) benchmarks. As the distribution of firms' carbon intensity is very skewed, excluding a...

This paper investigates short-term effects of big tech start-up acquisitions on innovation empirically. Innovation research has found a strong positive, causal relationship between VC investment and innovation. Using this insight, we can explore the repercussions of big tech start-up...

The economic and political developments of the past years show an increasing importance of a possible risk-reducing of the company due to good ESG performance. Our work contributes by examining the impact of relatively better ESG performance of companies on their implied and historical share...

We present evidence that equity momentum strategies are partially driven by positive-feedback trading intermediated via the mutual fund sector. We identify a U.S.-specific structural break to this channel that substantially weakened the relationship between fund flows and past style returns. As...

Standard measures of PE performance based on cash flows overlook discount rate risk. An index constructed from prices paid in secondary market transactions indicates that PE discount rates vary considerably. While the standard alpha for our index is zero, measures of performance based on cash...

We study the asset allocation problem of an institutional investor (LP) that invests in stocks, bonds, and private equity (PE). PE investments are risky, illiquid, and long-term. The LP repeatedly commits capital to PE funds, and this capital is gradually called and eventually distributed back...

The paper models and analyses the dynamics of credit spread curves based on ratings over the period from 2004 to 2021. Using more than 1.5 million data points of individual bonds, instead of using index data, monthly asset swap spread (ASW) curves are constructed for all rating levels. The paper...