We examine the dynamic ownership structure of corporate bonds after initial issuance. We find that as bonds “season”, the market learns more about them. This learning leads to less concentrated bond ownership over time. Specifically, learning induces a shift in bond ownership from more...

We investigate whether mutual funds whose investors and stocks are decoupled (i.e., investor location does not coincide with that of the stock holdings) benefit from a natural hedge as they have fewer outflows during market downturns and fewer inflows during upturns. Using a sample of equity...

Efficient financial globalization should reward high-skilled financial institutions and punish low-skilled institutions. We show that the globalization of the mutual fund industry in the beginning of the century has exhibited the opposite pattern: low-skilled companies can benefit from...

Inspired by the recent health science findings that air pollution affects mental health and cognition, we examine whether air pollution can intensify the cognitive bias observed in the financial markets. Based on a proprietary data set obtained from a large Chinese mutual fund family consisting...

We use the 2007 acquisition of Dow Jones & Co. by News Corporation to study whether the perception of a news source's political affiliation affects its credibility and financial market impact. Following 2007, the price of Republican- (Democrat-) aligned stocks becomes less sensitive to positive...

We examine whether investor behavior can be influenced by the social norms to which they are exposed. Specifically, we test two competing hypotheses regarding the influence of social trust on the disposition effect related to mutual fund investment. On the one hand, a higher level of social...

We study how secular culture affects firm behavior when formal institutions fall short. We find that firms more exposed to alcohol-related sin culture exhibit more earnings management and lean their operations more toward local business partners. Tests using latitude and snow/temperature as...

Positive return correlation signals slowly-diffusing information. Short sell-constrained institutions are mainly informed in their buy trades. Building on these facts, we identify informed investors ex ante by focusing on mutual funds. We propose a measure of the dynamic excess autocorrelation...

We study how debt market frictions that constrain the ability of firms to buffer a tightening in bank credit supply affect corporate yield spreads. We focus on the frictions driven by the regional availability of debt financing. We provide evidence of a strong regional segmentation in the debt...

We hypothesize that poor country-level governance, which makes public information less reliable, induces fund managers to increase their use of semi-public information. Utilizing data from international mutual funds and stocks over the 2000-2009 period, we find that semi-public...