Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may AbstractWe examine the influence on managerial risk taking of incentives due to employment risk and due to compensation. Our empirical investigation of the risk taking behavior of mutual fund managers indicates that managerial risk taking crucially depends on the relative importance of these incentives. When employment risk is more important than compensation incentives, fund managers with a poor midyear performance tend to decrease risk relative to leading managers to prevent potential job loss. When employment risk is low, compensation incentives become more relevant and fund managers with a poor midyear performance increase risk to catch up with the midyear winners. JEL classifications:G23, M54

This paper investigates politically connected firms in Germany. With the introduction of a new transparency law in 2007, information on additional income sources for all members of the German parliament became publicly available. We find that members of the conservative party (CDU/CSU) and the liberal party (FDP) are more likely to work for firms than members of left-wing parties (SPD and The Left) or the green party (Alliance 90/The Greens). Politically connected firms are larger, less risky and have lower market valuations than unconnected firms. They also have fewer growth opportunities, but slightly better accounting performance. On the stock market, connected firms significantly outperformed unconnected firms in 2006, i.e. before the publication of the data on political connections. Differences in stock market performance were much smaller in 2007. Copyright 2010 The Authors. German Economic Review 2010 Verein für Socialpolitik.

We hypothesize that a source of commonality in a stock's liquidity arises from correlated trading among the stock's investors. Focusing on correlated trading of mutual funds, we find that stocks with high mutual fund ownership have comovements in liquidity that are about twice as large as those for stocks with low mutual fund ownership. We also find that stocks owned by mutual funds with higher turnover have higher commonality in liquidity and that the impact of ownership on commonality is stronger when funds experience liquidity shocks themselves. These results suggest an important role for the demand side of liquidity in explaining commonality.

In this paper we examine intra-firm competition in the U.S. mutual fund industry.Our empirical study shows that fund managers within mutual fund families compete against each other. They adjust the risk they take dependent on the relative position within their fund family. The direction of the adjustment crucially hinges on the competitive situation within a family. Funds from small families behave in the opposite way than funds from large families. The results are very robust. They hold for different time periods and for different subgroups of funds.