We exploit the merger between BlackRock and Barclays Global Investors to study how changes in expected ownership concentration affect the investment behavior of funds and the cross-section of stocks worldwide. We find that funds with open-end structures and a large exposure to commonly-held...

The hedge fund industry has grown from $200 billion in assets under management around the turn of the millennium to now over $3 trillion. Many reports have criticized hedge funds for poor performance, particularly since the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC). In this paper, I seek to demystify...

We study the effect of environmental, social and governance (ESG) scores on the portfolio allocations of institutional investors. Using a unique data set, we find that institutional investor holdings (as measured by 13F filings) are strongly driven by the ESG quality of companies. While...

This paper investigates the sensitivity of the demand for safe government debt to currency unhedged and hedged excess returns in a sample of US mutual funds. We find evidence of active rebalancing towards government bonds that offer relatively higher returns on an unhedged basis, in particular...

Trustees and other investment fiduciaries of pensions, charities, and personal trusts, and those who advise them, face increasing pressure to rely on ESG factors in the investment management of tens of trillions of dollars of other people's money. At the same time, however, confusion abounds...

Investors often focus their attention on recent information only, underestimating the rele-vance of information from the distant past. In consequence, the ordering of historical re-turns robustly predicts future stock performance in the cross-section. Using data from 49 countries, we...

Cultural literacy is analogous to financial literacy and is almost as important. Cultural literacy matters to advisors as they design fitting financial plans because clients carry within them the cultures of their countries of origin long after they have settled in their countries of residence....