Essays on mutual funds and their impact on financial stability

This dissertation consists of two chapters that explore some of the financial stability issues that concern mutual funds. The first chapter demonstrates that the massive sale by US funds of Mexican equity in 2008 triggered the underpricing of US-fund-held Mexican stocks. Mexican funds that also owne...

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Bibliographic Details
Author: De Jesus, Miguel Karlo
Format: doctoral thesis
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2018
Country:España
Institution:CBUC, CESCA
Repository:TDR. Tesis Doctorales en Red
OAI Identifier:oai:www.tdx.cat:10803/461539
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10803/461539
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Financial stability
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Description
Summary:This dissertation consists of two chapters that explore some of the financial stability issues that concern mutual funds. The first chapter demonstrates that the massive sale by US funds of Mexican equity in 2008 triggered the underpricing of US-fund-held Mexican stocks. Mexican funds that also owned these stocks joined the US funds in selling, while those that did not bought them. Ultimately, I find that the Mexican fund purchases counterbalanced the price pressure from US funds, while the sales exacerbated stock mispricing. In the second chapter, I present a novel mechanism by which fund managers can have risk-taking incentives when monetary policy is loose. I develop a model of portfolio allocation with costly information and show that poor fund returns are penalized less by investor outflows when the risk-free rate is lower. I likewise establish that this effect is more pronounced for funds with higher information costs. Using the Federal funds rate as the riskless rate and fund age as a proxy for information costs, I provide empirical support for these predictions.