Conference Agenda

With more than $40 trillion dollars under management, institutional investors of funds play an important role in the financial market. Using novel data on fund viewership, we are the first to examine how these investors allocate attention to specific institutional funds. Exploiting quasi-random variation in screen display features on a prominent institutional asset management platform as instruments, we provide causal evidence that their direct attention drives flows to institutional funds and exerts positive price pressure on their underlying stocks. Overall, our evidence suggests that even sophisticated institutional fund investors suffer from attention constraints, which have important asset pricing implications.