Over nearly a quarter of a century, ETFs have become one of the most popular passive investment vehicles among retail and professional investors due to their low transaction costs and high liquidity. By the end of 2016, the market share of ETFs topped over 10% of the total market capitalization...

Large institutional investors own an increasing share of equity markets. We conjecture that a financial market in which large institutions dominate operates differently than a market populated by smaller independent investors. To support this view, we show that funds within the same family...

We study whether exchange traded funds (ETFs)--an asset of increasing importance--impact the volatility of their underlying stocks. Using identification strategies based on the mechanical variation in ETF ownership, we present evidence that stocks owned by ETFs exhibit significantly higher...

Brokers continue to play a critical role in intermediating institutional stock market transactions. More than half of all institutional investor order flow is still executed by high-touch (non-electronic) brokers. Despite the continued importance of brokers, we have limited information on what...

A growing literature uses the Russell 1000/2000 reconstitution event as an identification strategy to investigate corporate finance and asset pricing questions. To implement this identification strategy, researchers need to approximate the ranking variable used to assign stocks to indexes. We...

Using trade-level data, we study whether brokers play a role in spreading order flow information. We focus on large portfolio liquidations, which result in temporary drops in stock prices, and identify the brokers that intermediate these trades. We show that these brokers' best clients tend to...

This paper shows that the network of relationships between brokers and institutional investors shapes the information diffusion in the stock market. We exploit trade-level data to show that central brokers gather information by executing informed trades, which is then leaked to their best...

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are the most prominent financial innovation of the last three decades. Early ETFs offered broad-based portfolios at low cost. As competition became more intense, issuers started offering specialized ETFs that track niche portfolios and charge high fees. Specialized...

Despite positive and significant earnings announcement premia, we find that institutional investors reduce their exposure to stocks before earnings announcements. A novel result on the sensitivity of flows to individual stock returns provides a potential explanation. We show that extreme...

The availability of credit varies over the business cycle through shifts in the leverage of financial intermediaries. Empirically, we find that intermediary leverage is negatively aligned with the banks' Value-at-Risk (VaR). Motivated by the evidence, we explore a contracting model that captures...