scholarly journals Informed Trading in Business Groups

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 351-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alvaro Pedraza

Abstract Business groups, which are collections of legally independent companies with a significant amount of common ownership, dominate private sector activity in developing countries. This paper studies information flows within these groups by examining the trading performance of institutional investors in firms that belong to the same group. Using a novel dataset with complete transaction records in Colombia, this paper estimates the difference in returns between trades of asset managers in group-affiliated companies and trades of non-affiliated managers in the same stocks during the same period. The data show that affiliated managers display superior timing ability and that their trades outperform those of non-affiliated managers by 0.85 percent per month. The evidence suggests that institutional investors with group affiliation access information that is only available to members of the group. In order to limit the use of private information, financial authorities might need to expand their disclosure rules to monitor the trades of group-affiliated investors.

2021 ◽  
pp. 227-262
Author(s):  
Luca Enriques ◽  
Alessandro Romano

This chapter shows how network theory can improve our understanding of institutional investors’ voting behaviour and, more generally, their role in corporate governance. The standard idea is that institutional investors compete against each other on relative performance and hence might not cast informed votes, due to rational apathy and rational reticence. In other words, institutional investors have incentives to free-ride instead of ‘cooperating’ and casting informed votes. We show that connections of various kinds among institutional investors, whether from formal networks, geographical proximity, or common ownership, and among institutional investors and other agents, such as proxy advisors, contribute to shaping institutional investors’ incentives to vote ‘actively’. They also create intricate competition dynamics: competition takes place not only among institutional investors (and their asset managers) but also at the level of their employees and among ‘cliques’ of institutional investors. Employees, who strive for better jobs, are motivated to obtain more information on portfolio companies than may be strictly justified from their employer institution’s perspective, and to circulate it within their network. Cliques of institutional investors compete against each other. Because there are good reasons to believe that cliques of cooperators outperform cliques of non-cooperators, the network-level competition might increase the incentives of institutional investors to collect information. These dynamics can enhance institutional investors’ engagement in portfolio companies and also shed light on some current policy issues such as the antitrust effects of common ownership and mandatory disclosures of institutional investors’ voting.


2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huong Giang (Lily) Nguyen ◽  
Xiangkang Yin ◽  
Luong Hoang Luong

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Chemmanur ◽  
Gang Hu ◽  
Jiekun Huang

AbstractWe make use of a large sample of transaction-level institutional trading data to test an extended version of Brennan and Hughes’ (1991) information production theory of stock splits. We compare brokerage commissions paid by institutional investors before and after a split, assess the private information held by them, and relate the informativeness of their trading to brokerage commissions paid. We show that institutions make abnormal profits net of brokerage commissions by trading in splitting stocks. We also show that the information asymmetry faced by firms goes down after stock splits. Overall, our empirical results support the information production theory.


Author(s):  
Helen Campbell Pickford

The adoption of the Economics of Mutuality will depend on institutional investors promoting it through active engaged investing. Chapter 18 describes how some investment funds are taking an active role in managing the companies in which they are invested. It involves them acquiring significant blocks of shares that are held for extended periods of time and managed directly by asset owners themselves instead of by intermediary asset managers. Critical to this is the way in which the performance of their investments is monitored and measured. Alongside measuring financial performance over longer periods of time than is conventionally the case, performance needs to be assessed in relation to other indicators of performance related to human, social, and natural capital.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Fichtner

During the last decades, institutional investors gained an ever more important position as managers of assets and owners of corporations. By demanding (short-term) shareholder value, some of them have driven the financialization of corporations and of the financial sector itself. This chapter first characterizes the specific roles that private equity funds, hedge funds, and mutual funds have played in this development. It then moves on to focus on one group of institutional investors that is rapidly becoming a pivotal factor for corporate control in many countries – the “Big Three” large passive asset managers BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street.


Author(s):  
Mine Uğurlu

Corporate R&D Investments,that constitute basis for sustainable development, are influenced by external and firm-specific risks.Evidence shows that firms in Turkey have increased R&D spending during subprime crisis despite its procyclicality in most of the emerging countries.This chapter investigates if business group affiliation or corporate diversification that is predominant in Turkey stimulate R&D investments under risk.It focuses on internal capital markets of business groups or conglomerates that may enhance R&D spending by reducing financial constraints, and likelihood of distress of the affiliated firms.The results reveal that group affiliation and diversification positively affect corporate R&D spending when firm-specific risks rise.These results are significant during the global crisis period.Group-affiliated corporations increase their R&D investments as idiosyncratic risks rise.The diversified conglomerates increase R&D investments when earnings volatility and equity erosion rise.Results indicate that large firms are more inclined to reduce R&D investments under risk.


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