Suchergebnisse

Business groups, which are collections of publicly traded companies with significant amount of common ownership, dominate private sector activity in developing countries. This paper studies how information flows within these groups by analyzing the trading behavior of pension fund managers in firms that belong to the same group. The paper shows that while pension fund managers are momentum traders on non-affiliated companies, they trade in anticipation of future abnormal returns in affiliated firms. Ownership concentration and business group ties exacerbate information asymmetries, discouraging investment and depressing stock market participation. Using the merger and acquisition activity among pension fund managers as a natural experiment, the paper provides evidence that increases in stock ownership concentration, via the threat of informed trading, adversely affect liquidity. The results indicate that cross-ownership structures and extensive investor-industry relations might curb the expected benefits from the presence of institutional investors, limiting market development.

This paper estimates the effects of peer benchmarking by institutional investors on asset prices. To identify trades purely due to peer benchmarking as separate from those based on fundamentals or private information, the paper exploits a natural experiment involving a change in a government imposed underperformance penalty applicable to Colombian pension funds. This change in regulation is orthogonal to stock fundamentals and only affects incentives to track peer portfolios allowing the authors to identify the component of demand due to peer benchmarking. The authors find that peer effects among pension fund managers generate excess in stock return volatility, with stocks exhibiting short-term abnormal returns followed by returns reversal in the subsequent quarter. Additionally, peer benchmarking produces an excess in comovement across stock returns beyond the correlation implied by fundamentals.

We estimate the effects of peer benchmarking by institutional investors on asset prices. To identify trades purely due to peer benchmarking as separate from those based on fundamentals or private information, we exploit a natural experiment involving a change in a government-imposed underperformance penalty applicable to Colombian pension funds. This change in regulation is orthogonal to stock fundamentals and only affects incentives to track peer portfolios, allowing us to identify the component of demand that is caused by peer benchmarking. We find that these peer effects generate excess stock return volatility, with stocks exhibiting short-term abnormal returns followed by returns reversal in the subsequent quarter. Additionally, peer benchmarking produces an excess in comovement across stock returns beyond the correlation implied by fundamentals.

This paper tries to explain why kidnapping has fallen so dramatically in Colombia during the period 2000-2008. The widely held belief is that the falling kidnapping rates can basically be explained as a consequence of the success of President Alvaro Uribe's democratic security policy. Without providing conclusive alternative explanations, some academic papers have expressed doubts about Uribe' security policy being the main cause of this phenomenon. While we consider the democratic security policy as constituting a necessary condition behind Colombia's falling kidnapping rates, we argue in this paper that a complementary condition underlying this phenomenon has been the significant increase during this period in the speed and quality of communications between potential victims and public security forces. In this sense, the expansion of the mobile phone industry in Colombia implies that there has been a substantial reduction in information asymmetries between kidnappers and targeted citizens. This has led to a higher level of deterrence as well as to higher costs for perpetrating this type of crime. This has resulted in a virtuous circle: improved security allows higher investments in telecommunications around the country, which in turn lead to faster communications between citizens and security forces, which consequently leads to greater security. We introduce a Becker-Ehrlich type supply and demand model for kidnappings. Using regional and departmental data on kidnapping, the police and mobile phones, we show that mobile phone network expansion has expanded the effective coverage of public protection; this, in turn, has led to a spectacular reduction in kidnapping rates. ; En este artículo presentamos una explicación de las causas de la dramática reducción del secuestro en Colombia entre 2000 y 2008. La creencia generalizada es que la disminución en las tasas de secuestro se explica fundamentalmente como consecuencia del éxito de la Política de Seguridad Democrática del Presidente Álvaro Uribe. Sin dar explicaciones alternativas concluyentes, algunos trabajos académicos han expresado dudas sobre esta hipótesis. En tanto nosotros consideramos que la Seguridad Democrática fue una razón necesaria para la disminución del secuestro, en este trabajo planteamos que la expansión y la mejor calidad de las comunicaciones entre las víctimas potenciales y la fuerza pública fue una condición complementaria a la política de seguridad para la disminución del secuestro. En este sentido, la expansión de la telefonía móvil en Colombia ha implicado una reducción en las asimetrías de información entre los secuestradores y las víctimas potenciales. Esto generó un efecto disuasivo y aumentó los costos de perpetrar este tipo de crimen. Así se dio un círculo virtuoso: las mejorías en la seguridad permitieron mayores inversiones en telecomunicaciones en todo el país, lo que a su vez implicó una mayor comunicación con la fuerza pública, y en consecuencia una mejora en seguridad. Para sustentar nuestra hipótesis introducimos un modelo teórico de oferta y demanda de secuestros del tipo Becker-Ehrlich. Usando información departamental y regional de secuestros, policía y celulares, mostramos que la expansión de la red de telefonía móvil incrementó la cobertura efectiva de la fuerza pública, lo que a su vez, condujo a una espectacular reducción de las tasas de secuestros.

This paper exploits a novel dataset covering the universe of transactions in the Colombian Stock Exchange to analyze episodes of additions to and deletions from MSCI equity indexes. The analysis finds that additions and deletions have large price effects: the median cumulative abnormal return in absolute value is 5.5 percent. The paper shows that these price effects are due to large demand shocks by different classes of international investors—not only passive funds and ETFs, but also active mutual funds, pension funds and government funds—which are not absorbed by arbitrageurs. Consistent with recent asset pricing models with limits to arbitrage, stock demand curves are estimated to be very inelastic: the demand elasticity for the median stock in the sample is −0.34, implying that a 1 percent increase in the demand for the stock increases its price by 2.9 percent.

This paper analyzes bank stock prices around the world to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the banking sector. Using a global database of policy responses during the crisis, the paper also examines the role of financial sector policy announcements on the performance of bank stocks. Overall, the results suggest that the crisis and the countercyclical lending role that banks are expected to play have put banking systems under significant stress, with bank stocks underperforming their domestic markets and other non-bank financial firms. The effectiveness of policy interventions has been mixed. Measures of liquidity support, borrower assistance, and monetary easing moderated the adverse impact of the crisis, but this is not true for all banks or in all circumstances. For example, borrower assistance and prudential measures exacerbated the stress for banks that are already undercapitalized and/or operate in countries with little fiscal space. These vulnerabilities will need to be carefully monitored as the pandemic continues to take a toll on the world's economies.

This paper studies loan conditions in a context where private banks can operate in two credit markets: a free-market with no government intervention and an earmarked market that relies on government funds and where interest rates are regulated. The paper examines the effects of earmarked lending on the spreads of free-market loans using a rich loan-level dataset on all Brazilian firms between 2005 and 2016. The evidence suggests that private banks strategically channel earmarked credit to firms that are ex ante more difficult to lock-in in the free-market– larger firms in more contested regions. The paper highlights a novel channel whereby earmarked credit is used by private banks to extract more rents. Once a firm receives an earmarked credit from its bank, its interest rates on new loans in the free-market increase while the loan volume remains mostly unaffected.