Doctorat en sciences sociales, politiques et économiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This thesis used the events of the 2007 financial crisis as a means of being able to add to the research already done on South African unit trusts. The objective was to study the risk-adjusted performance of South African general equity unit trusts against the market during the period between 2005 and 2014. This period took into account the bull market preceding the financial crisis, the market crash of 2007 and the subsequent market recovery that followed. Data was obtained online through the I-Net BFA data base and included 161 general equity unit trusts that contained a full data set. In addition to the general equity unit trusts, the Satrix40 was studied to compare a passive unit trust against those that are actively managed. The 10 year Government bond was also used as a risk-free rate to add to the comparisons of performance results. The Sharpe, Treynor and Jensen measures were applied to the data with the results adding more support to the opinions that markets are fairly efficient and active investment strategies are being challenged by consistently well performing passive investments. Throughout the duration of the study, taking into account the varying economic cycles, the Satrix40 passive investment showed the best average overall return on simple return calculations as well as during the risk-adjusted measurements. In support of active investment management, unit trusts showed their best relative performance figures during the period of the financial crisis. This suggested that active financial managers were able to make the active calls necessary to weather the storm of the financial crisis. While the study did have its limitations, the results it produced are intended to offer investors further knowledge in enabling them to make more educated investment decisions in the future.

This diploma thesis deals with the comparison of investment life insurance with risk life insurance and individual investment in open mutual funds in the territory of the Czech Republic. The theoretical part describes the basic characteristics of life insurance, open mutual funds and as a cross-section of the two products of the investment life insurance. It also describes the main cost indicators that can be used to calculate the cost of the insurance product. The analysis of the current situation is focused on a model example, in which the insurance products are compared and the investment part is evaluated. Subsequent comparison of results, selection of the most effective tool and recommendations are contained in the proposal section. The main goal of the diploma thesis is to determine the best solution for the end customer and to propose possible changes in the investment life insurance to make it more competitive.

Diploma thesis deals with the evaluation and the comparison of the performance of mutual funds and investment funds with a focus on the real estate sector. The essence and principles of mutual funds, ETF and REIT are presented, and the resulting weaknesses and advantages. According to the selected indicators, the profitability, riskiness and expense of the investment opportunities are examined and investment recommendations for management of an investment company and potential retail investors are established.

Det finns både växande intresse och uppmuntran till att investera kapital ansvarsfullt för att bidra till hållbar utveckling. Morningstar är en av flertalet aktörer som erbjuder extern värdering av fonders hållbarhetsprestation i syfte att förse investerare med objektiv bedömning. Syftet med uppsatsen är att utvärdera hur svenska investerare responderar till hållbarhetsverktyget. Målgruppen är begränsad till premiepensionssparare då systemet har hög täckningsgrad av den svenska befolkningen. Paneldatan omfattar 393 av Pensionsmyndighetens fonder i månadsfrekvens från januari 2016 till februari 2021, som resulterar i 24 366 observationer. Frågeställning besvaras genom att undersöka sambandet mellan fonders hållbarhetsbetyg och kapitalflöde eller marknadsvärde med hjälp av ekonometriska modellerna Pooled OLS och Fixed Effects. Målgruppen premiepensionssparare orsakar svåra mätproblem på grund av de dominerande passiva spararna med lång sparhorisont och låg handelsfrekvens. Det kräver mer förarbete i databearbetningen och metodtillämpning för att kunna dra slutsatser. Resultatet visar att hållbarhetsbetygen inte har någon signifikant effekt på kapitalflöde eller marknadsvärdet oavsett fond- eller/och tidsspecifika faktorer. Sambandets obefintlighet kan bero på premiepensionsspararnas demografi, långsiktiga sparhorisont, andra hållbarhetsstrategier och hållbarhetsbetyg samt hållbarhets dynamiskhet. / There are both growing interest and encouragement to invest your capital responsibly to contribute to a sustainable development. Morningstar is one of several players that offer external rating of mutual funds' sustainability performance in order to provide objective valuation to investors. Thus, this thesis paper wants to evaluate how Swedish investors respond to the Morningstar’s sustainability rating. The target group is limited to premiepensionssparare as the system has a high coverage of the Swedish population. The panel data comprises 393 of the Swedish Pensions Agency’s mutual funds in a monthly frequency from January 2016 to February 2021, resulting in 24 366 observations. The thesis question is answered by examining the relationship between mutual funds' sustainability ratings and their capital flow or market value by using the econometric models Pooled OLS and Fixed Effects. However, we are facing measurement difficulties due to the target group of premiepensionssparare being dominated by passive investors with long savings horizons and low trading frequency. This requires additional process of the data before applying the method and drawing conclusions. The results show that the sustainability ratings have no significant effect on capital flow or market value, whether we control for fund and/or time-specific factors. It means that premiepensionssparare do not respond to Morningstar's sustainability ratings. The non-existing relationship may depend on the pension savers’ demography, long-term savings horizon, other sustainable investment strategies and ratings as well as sustainability’s dynamism.

The recent massive shift by Americans into investment funds and the attendant rise of a core group of institutional shareholders has transformed the financial market landscape. This dissertation explores the economic and policy implications associated with this shift to intermediated capital markets. The underlying assumption has always been that the growing presence of institutional investors in capital markets would improve the corporate governance of their portfolio companies, thereby reducing managerial agency costs and increasing firm value. My research explains why the reality deviates from that ideal. Using two novel perspectives—tax and antitrust—this dissertation reveals the disruptive effects and market distortions associated with the rise of institutional ownership. Chapter 1 of this dissertation, Common Ownership: A Game Changer in Corporate Compliance, explores the effect of overlapping institutional ownership of public companies by institutional investors on corporate tax avoidance. Leading scholars now recognize that this type of “common ownership” can change company objectives and behavior in a way that may lead to economic distortions. This chapter explores one unexamined peril associated with such common ownership: the effect of this core group of institutional investors on the tax avoidance behavior of their portfolio companies. I show how common ownership can lead to a reduction in those companies’ tax liability by means of a newly recognized phenomenon I call “flooding.” This term describes a practice by which different companies that are owned by the same institutional shareholders simultaneously take aggressive tax positions to reduce their tax obligations. Due to the IRS’s limited audit capacity, this synchronized behavior is likely to overwhelm the agency and substantially reduce the probability that tax noncompliance will be detected and penalized. This outcome runs counter to the classic deterrence theory model (which assumes that the threat of enforcement deters noncompliance) and demonstrates how common ownership changes the way public firms approach legal risks. By revealing the systematic compliance distortion and attendant enforcement challenges that ensue when the same investors “own it all,” this chapter also highlights a hidden social cost of common ownership. Under the domination of common institutional investors, companies can more easily shirk their taxes, reducing U.S. tax revenues by billions. Ironically, many of these same investors proclaim themselves as socially responsible stewards of the companies they own, attracting millions of individual investors who factor Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues into their investment decisions. Corporate “flooding” affords an instructive example of the weakness of so-called ESG investment model. To mitigate the detrimental effect of common ownership on corporate tax compliance, this chapter proposes a double sanctions regime, whereby institutional investors would be penalized along with their portfolio companies for improper tax avoidance. Such a regime may help restore deterrence and may incentivize institutional investors to keep their social promises. Chapter 2 of this dissertation, The Agency Tax Costs of Mutual Funds, unveils another tax-related pitfall associated with what some scholars term the “separation of ownership from ownership” problem in intermediated markets. In such markets, retail mutual fund investors cede investment and voting decisions to institutional investors who manage the funds. As a result, actions undertaken unilaterally by financial intermediaries dictate the tax liability of passive individual investors. This chapter argues that the tax decisions of institutional investors are often guided by their own tax considerations rather than by the tax considerations of the beneficiaries who own mutual funds through conventional taxable accounts. Due to the pass-through tax rules that govern investment funds, these beneficiaries, unlike the institutional investors (who are compensated based on pre-tax performance), are tax-sensitive. These diverging incentives give rise to a new type of an agency costs problem. These agency tax costs arise from the institutional investors’ trading decisions, corporate stewardship activities, and their preferences in the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) context. I argue that the structure of M&A deals, the method of payment used in such deals, and even the premiums paid to sellers in such deals are distorted because the votes of passive tax-sensitive retail investors are cast by tax-insensitive institutional investors. As a result, institutional investors not only fail to replicate the tax outcomes that tax-sensitive investors could have achieved had they owned stock directly, but they also distort corporate voting outcomes for all stakeholders—even those with unmediated investments. This chapter proposes several options for mitigating agency tax costs, including mandatory separation of funds based on the tax profile of the beneficiaries, heightened tax disclosure by mutual funds, decentralization of votes in mutual fund sponsors, and pass-through voting systems. These alternatives would reduce the agency tax costs of mutual funds without imposing new agency costs on tax-insensitive shareholders who also rely on institutional investors for portfolio management. The agency tax costs problem undermines the traditional assumption that mutual funds and their individual investors have the common goal of maximizing returns. My research reveals that this underlying assumption is flawed, as it overlooks the tax rules that govern investment funds and the way these rules shape the economic incentives of mutual funds managers and advisors. These incentives create a conflict of interest between institutional investors and their tax-sensitive investors, which has been largely overlooked. The analysis of the agency tax costs problem also illuminates the ways in which the rise of financial intermediaries has impacted the tax behavior of public corporations, which in turn, has affected the tax liability of investors in capital markets. While this result has significant implications for market participants and society at large, the paths through which these effects occur and their underlying economic rationales have received little attention. This chapter addresses this scholarly gap by examining the role of corporate governance structures as well as the role of tax law and policy in shaping the tax incentives of the most powerful market actors in the U.S. economy. Chapter 3 of this dissertation, The Corporate Governance Cartel, offers a novel antitrust perspective on a growing phenomenon in capital markets that has accompanied the rise of institutional ownership: institutional investor coalitions. Traditionally, corporate law has regarded such coalitions as desirable, a solution to the well-known collective action problem facing public shareholders. In this chapter, I challenge that view by revealing the anticompetitive risks that investor coalitions pose. This chapter shows how investor coalitions can emerge at the border between firms and markets, affecting not only the intra-firm governance arrangements of the companies held by the coalition members—but capital markets as well. At the firm/market border, cooperation among institutional investors, even around seemingly benign corporate governance issues, provides an opportunity for tacit collusion among these investors in the markets in which they compete. To illustrate this problem, I use an antitrust lens to analyze the collective efforts of institutional investors to restrict the use of dual-class stock in initial public offerings (IPOs). This original account of the coalition against dual-class structures exposes the significant anticompetitive effects that may arise at the IPO juncture when competing buyers of shares in the primary market coordinate their response to a governance term. Since the members of the coalition collectively possess most of the expected market demand for public offerings, their joint efforts can be seen as an exercise of buyer-side power. The exploitation of such power effectively creates a cartel of buyers in the primary market, resulting in two potential economic distortions: (1) abnormal underpricing of dual-class offerings, and (2) suboptimal governance arrangements. Both distortions reveal overlooked perils associated with the massive aggregation of power by institutional investors. In my antitrust analysis of investor coalitions, I also focus on institutional investor consortiums, trade associations that promote governance principles on behalf of their institutional members, which notably are on the rise. In analyzing these consortiums, this chapter draws upon antitrust rules relative to standard-setting organizations and explores how these anticompetitive risks are exacerbated by these investor consortiums. Finally, this chapter proposes immediate regulatory responses aimed at preventing institutional investors from engaging in collective actions that limit competition. The suggested policies represent a means to resolve the delicate tension between the goal of corporate law to encourage collaboration among shareholders and the goal of antitrust law to restrict cooperation among competitors.

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Responsible investing is a growing concept as sustainability is becoming a much more apparent problem. Thus, the EU implemented a new regulation in 2021, the SFDR 2019/2088, to decrease information asymmetry between institutional investors and end investors regarding sustainable risks associated with funds’ investments. This thesis aims to study whether Swedish mutual funds are greenwashing in terms of funds that are classified as Article 9 funds and invest in firms with low ESG scores. I find that greenwashing occurs among some Swedish mutual funds classified as Article 9 funds, urging further actions to be taken by scholars, practitioners, and regulators given the complexity of the studied research field.

This dissertation consists of three chapters, each containing a distinct research paper in the field of macroeconomics. In the first chapter, I estimate the impact of mutual fund flows on corporate bond prices, issuance and firm investment. I leverage variation caused by the COVID-19 induced financial panic of March 2020 and find that safer firms suffered a larger impact in the component of bond spreads that does not compensate for expected default risk. However, I do not detect impacts of fund flows on issuance or investment. A simple model predicts liquidation decisions and price responses as being driven by demand and liquidation elasticities, which depend on the characteristics of the bond return processes. In the second chapter, we ask: what is the importance of firm and bank credit factors in determining investment responses to monetary policy? We decompose variation in corporate loan growth rates into purely firm-level and bank-level variation. The estimated factors are correlated with a set of variables that proxy for the firm’s and bank’s financial health. Firms with a higher borrowing factor experience relatively larger investment responses to an unexpected interest rate shock; the effect is muted when the shock is the reveal of central bank information. The bank factor does not induce similar heterogeneity in investment responses. In the third chapter, we ask: what is the nature of optimal monetary policy and central bank disclosure when the monetary authority is uncertain about the economic state? We consider a model in which firms make nominal pricing decisions and the central bank sets the nominal interest rate under incomplete information. We find that implementing flexible-price allocations is both feasible and optimal despite the existence of numerous measurability constraints; we explore a series of different implementations. When monetary policy is sub-optimal, public information disclosure by the central bank is welfare-improving as long as either firm or central bank information is sufficiently precise.

The following dissertation contains two unique empirical studies that contribute to the overall literature in the field of Financial Economics in the areas of mutual fund investing and financial intermediation and regulation. The first Chapter, entitled “The Impact of Macroeconomic Stress on the U.S. Financial Sector”, examines the relative impact of macroeconomic stress on financial and non-financial U.S. firms. Empirical results show that macroeconomic shocks appear to have a larger impact on financial firms. Additionally, the sensitivity of financial firms to macroeconomic events can be traced to the influence of non-depository institutions, or “shadow banks”, like finance and investment companies, which are less regulated than depository institutions. The results coincide with several trends in the financial sector including increased competition, complexity and interconnectedness and highlight the need for governance mechanisms that account for the risks associated with these factors. The second chapter, entitled “Partial Adjustment Towards Equilibrium Mutual Fund Allocations: Evidence from U.S.-based Equity Mutual Funds”, examines the relative efficiency of equity mutual funds in terms of speed of portfolio adjustment by applying a partial adjustment model. Empirical results show that mutual fund managers are able and willing to quickly adjust their portfolios when results have been sub-optimal, implying that the cost of persistent poor performance is perceived as being high. Managers can offset about 106 percent of the deviation within one period. Additionally, results show that funds that typically engage in the costly production of specialized information, like emerging market and sector funds have more efficient speeds of portfolio adjustment than more passive funds, like market index funds. The results imply that actively managed funds may have efficiency advantages that have been previously ignored in the empirical literature.