No abstract

for comments and suggestions. We thank Gary Shea for generously sharing his data about 18th century British companies and John Turner for his advice on how to use British stock price information from the 19th century. George Jiang, Manisha Goswami and Cathy Quiambao provided valuable research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Fund managers are double agents; they serve both fund investors and owners of management firms. This conflict of interest may result in trading to support securities prices. Tests of this hypothesis in the Spanish mutual fund industry indicate that bank-affiliated mutual funds systematically increase their holdings in the controlling bank stock around seasoned equity issues, at the time of bad news about the controlling bank, before anticipated price drops, and after non-anticipated price drops. The results seem mainly driven by bank managers' incentives. Ownership of asset management companies thus matters and can distort capital allocation and asset prices.

What is the role of public enforcement in preventing widespread financial market misconduct? We study this question using the events surrounding the manipulation of the London Interbank Offer Rate (Libor). We find pervasive evidence consistent with banks misreporting Libor submissions to profit from Libor-related positions in the full sample 1999-2012. The evidence is initially stronger for banks incorporated outside the U.S., where enforcement is historically weaker, and it disappears in the aftermath of Libor investigations. Overall, our results suggest that improvements in public enforcement can be effective in deterring financial market misconduct.

No abstract