Sandy Lai

International Diversification with Large- and Small-Cap Stocks

To the extent that investors diversify internationally, large-cap stocks receive the dominant share of fund allocation. Increasingly, however, returns to large-cap stocks or stock market indices tend to comove, mitigating the benefits from international diversification. In contrast, stocks of locally oriented, small companies do not exhibit the same tendency. In this paper, we assess the potential of small-cap stocks as a vehicle for international portfolio diversification during the period 1980–1999. We show that the extra gains from the augmented diversification with small-cap funds are statistically significant for both in-sample and out-of-sample periods and remain robust to the consideration of market frictions.

The Role of Equity Funds in the Financial Crisis Propagation

The early stage of the 2007-08 financial crisis was marked by large value losses for bank stocks. This paper identifies the equity funds most affected by this valuation shock and examines its consequences for the nonfinancial stocks owned by the respective funds. We document three key empirical findings. First, ownership links to these distressed equity funds lead to large temporary underperformance of the most exposed nonfinancial stocks. Second, distressed equity funds make the better performing stocks in their portfolio the preferred liquidation choice, which implies clustering of fire sale discounts among stocks in the high return quantiles. Third, stocks with higher overall fund ownership generally performed better throughout the crisis.

Technological Progress and Ownership Structure

Innovation processes under patent protection generate holdup problems if complementary patents are owned by different firms. We show that in line with Hart and Moore (1990), shareholder ownership overlap across firms with patent complementarities helps mitigate such holdup problems and correlates significantly with higher patent investment and more patent success as measured by future citations. The positive innovation effect is strongest for concentrated overlapping ownership and for the cases when the overlapping shareholders are dedicated investors.