Using a comprehensive dataset on issuances and holdings of contingent convertible debt instruments (CoCos) issued by European banks we investigate who invests in European CoCos. The results indicate that most European CoCos are not directly held by euro area investors. Foreign investors outside...

Diversification by banks affects the systemic risk of the sector. Importantly, Wagner (2010) shows that linear diversification increases systemic risk. We consider the case of securitization, whereby loan portfolios are sliced into tranches with different seniority levels. We show that tranching...

This study investigates whether banks and insurance corporations perform regulatory arbitrage by buying bonds with inflated credit ratings. We argue that credit rating based capital requirements incentivize banks and insurance corporations to hold more bonds with inflated credit ratings. We...

This paper uses granular bond portfolio data to study how banking systems across the European Union (EU) adjust their asset holdings in response to regulatory solvency shocks. We also study the impact of these shocks at financial intermediaries on the prices of bonds in their portfolio. Despite...

This study investigates herding behaviour exhibited by Dutch pension funds in the sovereign bond market. It uses a unique dataset on sovereign bond holdings of pension funds, mutations and transactions between December 2008 and December 2014. It covers 67 large Dutch pension funds that invest in...

We analyze the relation between investment returns and performance fees for 218 Dutch occupational pension funds with an average total of 985 billion euro in assets under management from 2012 to 2015. Our dataset is free from self-reporting biases and includes total return, excess return and...

Using regulatory data that are free of self-reporting bias for 2007-2016, we decompose investment returns of 455 Dutch pension funds according to their key investment decisions, i.e. asset allocation, market timing and security selection. In extension to existing papers, we also assess the...

A well established believe in the pension industry is that collective pension funds should take more stock market risk (compared to individual retirement accounts) since risk may be shared with future generations. We extend the OLG model of Gollier (2008) by adding labor income risk in the...

This study investigates the impact of the Eurosystem's Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) on the micro market structure of sovereign bonds. In particular, we analyze how the PSPP affected the ownership concentration of PSPP-eligible bonds. In line with portfolio rebalancing models we...

We study how pension fund (out)performance is influenced by a) a pension fund's activity, i.e., how much the pension fund deviates in its stock allocation from the typical pension fund behavior, and b) whether the pension fund exploits short- or long-term mispricing opportunities (measured by...