Pension funds have been expected to invest in a wide range of securities and provide liquidity to domestic capital markets since they are the most sophisticated investors, with plenty of resources to gather private information and manage portfolios professionally. However, by analyzing unique,...

This paper explores the behavior of emerging market mutual funds using anovel database covering the holdings of individual funds over the periodJanuary 1996 to March 1999. An examination of individual crises shows that,on average, funds withdrew money one month prior to the events. Thedegree of...

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...

The present paper aims to test a new model comparison methodology by calibrating and comparing three agent-based models of financial markets on the daily returns of 18 indices. The models chosen for this empirical application are the herding model of Gilli & Winker, its asymmetric version by...