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We investigate the effect of pre-IPO investments by public market institutional investors (institutions) on the exit of venture capitalists (VCs). Results indicate that institutions’ pre-IPO investments reduce IPO underpricing by mitigating VCs’ reliance on all-star analysts to boost market liquidity. We conclude that institutions facilitate VC exits in the secondary market. Supporting this view, our analysis reveals that the presence of institutions allows VCs to exit with a reduced price impact in the secondary market. Consistent with the ease of exit, VCs offer fewer shares at the IPO and are more likely to invest in institutionally backed startups.

What could be the result if some compelling opportunities, like lottery jackpots, were potentially lucrative enough to distract the investors' attention from monitoring the stock market?

We empirically examine the impact of industry exchange-traded funds (IETFs) on informed trading and market efficiency. We find that IETF short interest spikes simultaneously with hedge fund holdings on the member stock before positive earnings surprises, reflecting long-the-stock/short-the-ETF activity. This pattern is stronger among stocks with high industry risk exposure. A difference-in-difference analysis on the ETF inception event shows that IETFs reduce post-earnings-announcement drift more among stocks with high industry risk exposure, suggesting that IETFs improve market efficiency. We also find that the short interest ratio of IETFs positively predicts IETF returns, consistent with the hedging role of IETFs.

The concept of smart beta has a lot of data to draw on. Many so-called factors such as value, size, low volatility and momentum appear to have delivered decades of positive risk-adjusted returns, on average, for investors.

We propose that investor beliefs frequently “cross” in the sense that an investor may like company A but dislike company B, whereas another investor may like company B but dislike company A. Such belief-crossing makes it almost impossible to construct a portfolio that is composed solely of every investor’s most favored companies. This causes the level of excitement for portfolios to be generally lower than the levels of excitement that individual companies generate among their most fervent supporters. Coupled with short-sale constraints, wherein prices are set by the most optimistic investors, this causes portfolios to trade at discounts. Utilizing several settings whereby the value of a portfolio and the values of the underlying components can be evaluated separately (e.g., closed-end funds), we present evidence supporting our proposition that, in financial markets, the “whole” is often less than the “sum of its parts.”

We study the effects of institutionalization on fund manager compensation and asset prices. Institutionalization raises the performance-sensitive component of the equilibrium contract, which makes institutional investors effectively more risk averse. Institutionalization affects market outcomes through two opposing effects. The direct effect is to bring in more informed capital, and the indirect effect is to make each institutional investor trade less aggressively on information through affecting the equilibrium contract. When there are many institutions and little noise trading in the market, the indirect contracting effect dominates the direct informed capital effect in determining market variables such as the cost of capital, return volatility, price volatility, and market liquidity. Otherwise, the direct informed capital effect dominates.

We hypothesize that when investors pay less attention to financial markets, they rationally allocate relatively more attention to market-level information than to firm-specific information, leading to increases in stock return co-movements. Using large jackpot lotteries as exogenous shocks that attract investors’ attention away from the stock market, we find supportive evidence that stock returns co-move more with the market on large jackpot days. This effect is stronger for stocks preferred by retail investors and is not driven by gambling sentiment. We also find that stock returns are less sensitive to earnings surprises and co-move more with industries on large jackpot days.