Essays on Institutional Investors, Portfolio Choice and Asset Prices

This dissertation is a collection of five independent chapters that aim to better understand the investment decisions of institutional investors. The share of institutional investors that holds and trades securities has substantially increased over the past decades. Since the eighties, the share of US equities held by institutional investors has grown by more than half, from 52 percent to approximately 80 percent (Stambaugh, 2014). This increase raises three important questions. First, what are the drivers behind the investment decisions of institutional investors? Second, how do their investment decisions subsequently affect asset prices? Third, and perhaps most importantly, how do their decisions affect the investors where we ultimately care about, namely, the households?

This thesis was partly funded by Instituut Gak.