We examine the relationship between portfolio risk and equity returns over different investment horizons of institutional investors. Compared to long-term institutions, portfolios held by short-term institutions exhibit higher factor loadings in market, size, and momentum. In particular, they...

Selecting managers on the basis of past performance is an intuitive strategy that seems trusted by investors. Indeed, many studies report a positive correlation between past fund returns and investor cash flows. Evidence also suggests that at least at shorter-term horizons investing with the top...

We study the equilibrium implications of a multi-asset economy in which asset managers are subject to different benchmarks, and demonstrate how heterogeneous benchmarking generates a mechanism through which fundamental shocks propagate across assets. Fluctuations in asset managers' capital...

We examine the proposition that investor attention affects the optimality of financial decisions. Using a novel dataset on the sociodemographic characteristics of visitors to mutual fund websites, we link the characteristics of investors to the characteristics of mutual funds that capture their...

Counter cyclical long-term investment strategies of insurance companies and pension funds (ICPFs) can support the stability of the financial system. Yet there is limited understanding of how ICPFs invest during market shocks, such as the global financial crisis and the European sovereign debt...

This paper uses unique and detailed transaction data to analyse herding behavior among pension funds. We distinguish between weak, semi strong and strong herding behaviour. Weak herding occurs if pension funds have similar rebalancing strategies. Semi strong herding arises when pension funds...

In this paper, we show that institutional investors, like pension funds, may outperform standard market portfolio benchmarks. These results agree with contemporary research on pension funds' performance. Yet, the current research does not explain why do pension funds are able to outperform the...

Valuation-based market timing demonstrates strong potential to improve risk-adjusted returns for conservative long-term investors. Such timing strategies based on the cyclically-adjusted price-earnings ratio provide comparable returns as a 100 percent stocks buy-and-hold strategy but with...

Using a large transaction level dataset, we find that institutional investors can make economically insignificant -4 to 9 basis points net profit on their marked-to-market portfolio of buy – sell transactions over 1-day to 4-week holding period. The negative net marked-to-market profit comes...