In this study, we explore whether Wikipedia plays a governance role in the financial market by reducing the information disadvantage of individual investors. We hypothesize that the aggregation of information on Wikipedia enables individual investors to collectively monitor insiders and institutional investors. Using the creation of a firm Wikipedia page as an information event, our empirical r...

Does being located near institutional investors benefit corporations? We examine whether the ‘presence’ of local institutional investors, as measured by the equity assets under management of local institutions, reduces information asymmetry in the stock market. Firms in high institutional presence areas experience higher liquidity, faster information incorporation, lower costs of equity capital...

The terms of the Fellowship require that I organize a conference related in someway to ethics and business leadership, a rather broad and open-ended mandate. I think the importance of corporate governance in American public companies is clearly related to ethics and business leadership. And I would also say that the complex and rapidly evolving role of institutional owners will see a great deal...

Empirical evidence indicates that trades by institutional investors have sizable effects on asset prices, generating phenomena such as index effects, asset-class effects and others. It is difficult to explain such phenomena within standard representative-agent asset pricing models. In this paper, we consider an economy populated by institutional investors alongside standard retail investors. In...

We document a previously unknown source of information exploited by sophisticated institutional investors: the Freedom of Information Act, a law that allows for the full or partial disclosure of previously unreleased information and documents controlled by the United States government. Through our own FOIA requests, we uncover the identities of several large institutional investors, chiefly hed...

We present a theory of excess stock market volatility, in which market movements are due to trades by very large institutional investors in relatively illiquid markets. Such trades generate significant spikes in returns and volume, even in the absence of important news about fundamentals. We derive the optimal trading behavior of these investors, which allows us to provide a unified explanation...