The Behavior of Institutional Investors

The Behavior of Institutional Investors
Author: Alexander Pütz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Index mutual funds
ISBN: 9783832531898

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Institutional investors such as mutual funds and hedge funds play an important role in today's financial markets. This thesis consists of three essays which empirically study the behavior of active fund managers. In particular, the first essay investigates whether managers behave rationally or if some of them unconsciously make wrong investment decisions due to behavioral biases. The second essay examines whether some managers intentionally act to solely advance their own interests by strategically valuing the security positions in their portfolio. The third essay analyzes what the managers' education reveals about their investment behavior.

Two Essays on Investments

Two Essays on Investments
Author: Jie Zhu
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre:
ISBN:

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In my dissertation, I study factors that influence investments from either corporate or institutional perspective. First, I examine the sensitivity of corporate investment to internally generated cash flow and its pattern of change over time across countries. Second, I investigate how a firm's customer profile can shape its ownership structure of institutional investors. Existing studies have documented a puzzling disappearance of investment-cash flow (ICF) sensitivity in the U.S.. In the first chapter, I explore whether economic and financial development can explain the extent of a country's ICF sensitivity and its evolution through time. I find that, in aggregate, ICF sensitivity has also faded around the world; yet it has remained high in countries with low economic and financial development. Further, I find that the access to external finance, especially equity finance, is a key channel through which country-level development affects the sensitivity of investment to internal cash flow. In more developed countries, external finance has become more accessible for firms when their internal cash flow is insufficient, thereby reducing their reliance on internal cash flow. The results indicate that once a country advances to a certain degree of financial and economic development, it becomes more efficient in allocating resources and therefore financial constraints at the individual firm level become less binding. A growing literature has documented different financial implications of a concentrated customer base. In the second chapter, I examine how customer concentration affects institutional investors' investment decisions. I find that a firm's customer concentration tends to attract different groups of institutional investors, depending upon their investment horizons. Specifically, those institutions who trade actively (short-term) would buy the stocks of firms with a more concentrated customer base. Conversely, those institutions who trade less actively (long-term) would buy the stocks of firms with a less concentrated customer base. While the preference of long-term investors is supported by the increased risk associated with the dependency on a few large customers, I find that the improved stock liquidity is the channel through which a concentrated customer base attracts short-term investors. Further, my findings cannot be explained by information transfer along the supply chain.

Essays on the Impact of Sentiment on Real Estate Investments

Essays on the Impact of Sentiment on Real Estate Investments
Author: Anna Mathieu
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 133
Release: 2015-11-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3658116374

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Anna Mathieu clarifies if real estate decisions are affected by investor and consumer sentiment and how severely the sentiment should be considered. With regard to international capital markets Mathieu conducts an analysis of the impact of investor sentiment on the return of the real estate-specific investment vehicle “Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT)” by applying a GARCH-Model. She investigates the effects of investor sentiment on the return and the underlying volatilities of REITs and Non-REITs during the financial crisis. The hypotheses are tested for validity in a GARCH-Model. Parallel to capital markets and thereby in changing from an indirect Real Estate investment perspective to a direct perspective the author conducts an analysis if consumer sentiment impacts the household decision to buy a new home in the US. Therefore a dataset with 385 monthly observations from 1978 to 2010 is tested by a component model.

Three Essays on Institutional Investors and Income Taxes

Three Essays on Institutional Investors and Income Taxes
Author: Spencer Conley Usrey
Publisher:
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2009
Genre: Electronic dissertations
ISBN:

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This dissertation investigates the role of institutional investors in capital market tax studies. Specifically, this studies examines how institutional investors influence firms' cost of capital and financing decisions following changes in personal tax rates on debt and equity income. The dissertation is organized into three essays that examine these topics. The first two essays examine tax rate changes in 1997 and 2003 that reduced the personal tax rates on interest, capital gains and dividends. Essay 3 summarizes relevant literature involving institutional investors and capital market tax studies. Essay 1 investigates whether differences between the tax liabilities of the underlying shareholders of institutional investors affect firms' capital structures and decisions to issue debt versus equity following changes in tax rates on investment income received by individuals. The study predicts that firms with high concentrations of tax disadvantaged institutional investors (institutions whose underlying shareholders are taxable) will issue more equity relative to debt than those with high concentrations of tax-advantaged institutional investors (institutions whose underlying shareholders are not taxable). The results find that the financing decisions of firms with high levels of tax-disadvantaged institutional investors are influenced by changes in individual tax rates. Essay 2 investigates whether differences in the tax attributes of the underlying shareholders of institutional investors influences the impact of equity tax rate changes on a firm's cost of equity. The study examines a sample period of two years (eight quarters) around the enactment of the 1997 and 2003 Acts. The study finds that firms with high levels of tax-disadvantaged ownership experienced a decrease in their cost of equity capital following a decrease in the individual tax rate on capital gains. In addition, the interaction of the institutional investor dummy variable and a dummy variable indicating the observation is after the 2003 Act indicates that the cost of equity capital for firms with high levels of tax-disadvantaged ownership decreased following the 2003 Act. The results of Essays 1 and 2 provide evidence that institutional investors are not homogeneous with respect to their influence on firms' cost of capital and financing decisions following changes in individual tax rates.

Three Essays in Investments

Three Essays in Investments
Author: Luqi Xu
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021
Genre: Electronic dissertations
ISBN:

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Sentiment is an important concept in economics and finance and has been the focus of many studies. Individual investors, professional investors, corporate managers, and households have sentiments on the economy and financial markets which affect their decisions, and hence economic activities and asset prices. Measuring sentiment and determining what factors affect it have significant importance in finance research. My dissertation studies this subject by introducing state-of-the-art methods from artificial intelligence to measure the sentiment in several sources of business text data, that is, public firms disclosures and mutual funds reports. I investigate the information content, determinants, and the effects of the sentiments on asset prices and investment decisions of investors. In chapter one, we use a novel text classification approach from deep learning to accurately measure sentiment in a large sample of 10-Ks. In contrast to prior literature, we find that both positive and negative sentiments predict abnormal returns and abnormal trading volume around the 10-K filing date and future firm fundamentals and policies. Our results suggest that the qualitative information contained in corporate annual reports is richer than previously found. In chapter two, I study the sentiment of mutual fund managers towards the stock market. Using a direct measure of managers market expectations extracted from mutual funds semi-annual reports, I find that fund managers extrapolate their funds past performance into their market outlook. Funds with managers who have higher market expectation take more risk by increasing their equity holdings and the beta of their equity portfolios, but underperform subsequently. In chapter three, we study the sentiment of mutual fund managers about specific stocks in their portfolios. We study some mutual funds practice of voluntarily disclosing investment ideas in their annual reports. The practice involves, at a minimum, expressing views on stocks which fund managers are optimistic about. We find that managers of larger and better performing funds discuss positions that have recently underperformed, those that make up larger portions of their portfolios, and those they have held for longer periods. Our findings suggest that managers disclose these recommendations to boost their own fund performance and to attract additional capital.

Fortune and Folly

Fortune and Folly
Author: William M. O'Barr
Publisher: Irwin Professional Publishing
Total Pages: 270
Release: 1992
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

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Today institutional investors dominate the stock market. They hold assets valued at about 6.5 trillion - almost one fifth of the country's financial assets. Furthermore, institutional investors now own well over half of the stock in the country's 100 largest corporations, including such flagship companies as IBM, GE, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil. Because of the tremendous influence institutional investors have on American corporations, business and government policymakers must make assumptions about how and why they make decisions - their priorities, motives, and concerns. In addition, anyone who markets to institutional investors needs to know what makes them tick. Sprinkled with candid and often colorful quotations from a variety of investment insiders, Fortune and Folly gives you a unique look at what really happens on Wall Street; facts that challenge the assumptions routinely made about the economic motivations of business behavior; new insights on pension safety and possible political influences; and economic analyses by Carolyn K. Brancato, the country's foremost expert on the economics of institutional investing.