This paper examines the role conviction plays in asset management and its relationship with investment returns. We measure the strength of fund manager conviction through a fund’s Active Share, i.e., the extent to which an investment portfolio differs from its benchmark index. First, we show...

Individuals increasingly buy mutual funds via on-line platforms, whose ‘best buy' recommendations heavily influence flows. As intermediaries of mutual funds, platforms provide none of the unobservable interaction or intangible benefits of brokers, and so allow clean tests of the determinants,...

We have developed a structural model to explain defined benefit (DB) pension funds' investment behaviour. The model is calibrated to the aggregate UK DB pension fund and four different cohorts of funds. We use the model to estimate how pension funds can be expected to adjust their asset...

This paper quantifies the impact of Robinhood traders on the US equity market. Within a structural model, we estimate retail and institutional demand curves and derive aggregate pricing implications via market clearing. The inelastic nature of institutional demand allows Robinhood traders to...

Has the antitrust arsenal run out of novel theories or weapons? Think again. Recent scholarship has come to challenge conventional wisdom with the latest target of antitrust imagination being institutional investors, including diversified index funds. New economic research suggests that common...

This study analyses the factors influencing institutional ownership in the largest non-financial companies listed in five major European countries from 2010 to 2015. Consistently with previous empirical literature, both country-level and firm-level variables result to be relevant. As for country...

Fundraising is one of the biggest challenges for venture capitalists in the wake of the financial crisis, causing some to argue that the venture capital model is broken? Maybe it looks that way, but actually the answer is that fundraising works differently. Indeed, this Paper shows that a...

This paper explores the effects of competition on risk-taking behavior and firm performance within the financial services industry. It does so by exploiting a regulatory change that allowed new players to enter the British mutual fund industry. Exploiting this regulatory shock, we trace...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the annual and of the long-term performance of personal pension funds relative to their Primary Prospectus Benchmarks (PPBs) and T-bills. The study covers 9,659 personal pension funds from across all 30 ABI investment sectors that operated in the...

This paper studies the relationship between fund and provider characteristics, and fund performance using a sample of 4,197 U.K personal pension funds operated by 35 providers over a 30 years' period (1980-2009). The fund performance is measured on an annual basis (short-term) and over the whole...