Participants in defined contribution (DC) retirement plans rarely adjust their portfolio allocations, suggesting that their investment choices and consequent money flows are sticky and not discerning. However, participants' inertia could be offset by DC plan sponsors, who adjust the plan's...

Prior research debates focus on whether investors are smart enough to invest in funds that subsequently outperform. This paper documents a robust smart money effect among small fund investors who invest in the top performing funds, even after controlling for the momentum factor argued by Sapp...

Why do investors entrust active mutual fund managers with large sums of money while receiving negative excess returns on average? Our explanation is that investors have a coarser information set than fund managers which leads them to systematically misinterpret managers' skill. When investors...

Using a novel database, we show that the stock-price impact of analyst trade ideas is at least as large as the impact of stock recommendation, target price, and earnings forecast changes, and that investors following trade ideas can earn significant abnormal returns. Trade ideas triggered by...

This paper examines how the rise of passive investing affects active management. I develop a parsimonious model of passive and active investment in which greater passive investment accelerates investors' learning about active managers' skill. The model provides a rational explanation, namely the...

We study passive funds' conflicts of interest by examining their securities lending decisions. We show that passive funds' lending varies with the costs of lending for their families. Passive funds are less likely to lend a security if (i) active funds in their families have a sizable stake in...

The ownership nationality of large US multinational companies plays an implicit but important role in the current debate over how such companies should be taxed. This paper identifies that role and investigates what is actually known about where these companies’ shareholders reside

We focus on firms that chronically underperform and evaluate ways that institutional investors can facilitate the redeployment of assets to higher valued uses. Our evidence indicates that institutional holdings affect firm survival. Increases in institutional holdings are associated with...

This study examines the relation between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and institutional investor ownership, and the impact of this relation on stock return volatility. We find that institutional ownership does not strictly increase or decrease in CSR; rather, institutional ownership is...

Monitoring by institutional investors can act as an important mechanism to promote firm innovation. By investigating Chinese listed firms' patenting between 2002 and 2011, we find that the presence of institutional investors enhances firm innovation. Consistent with the monitoring view, we...