We estimate the effects of peer benchmarking by institutional investors on asset prices. To identify trades purely due to peer benchmarking as separate from those based on fundamentals or private information, we exploit a natural experiment involving a change in a government-imposed...

We investigate the effects of introducing a central clearing counterparty (CCP) on securities prices by adopting as an experimental construct the 2009 CCP reform in three Nordic markets. We find that, relative to other European economies, these countries experience market-adjusted equity returns...

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...

This paper studies the eff ect of market belief risk on the cross-section of stock returns. Using actual and analyst EPS forecast data, we construct the market belief as the cross-sectional average of individual beliefs for all sample stocks, with individual belief de fined as the mean analyst...

This paper studies the behavior of REIT stock price synchronicity for the years 1997 through 2007. Theory suggests that REIT stock prices should be largely independent of market changes; and, at the very least, REITs should have a low covariance with other assets, including other REIT stocks....

Pension funds have greater fiduciary responsibilities than mutual funds and are also more severely punished for poor performance. Thus pension funds may find it particularly risky to deviate from peers. Consistent with this view, we find that pension funds herd and that their herding negatively...