January 30, Ehsan Mahdikhani
Date: 30 January 2026, Friday Time: 13.30 – 14.30 Place: MA-330 "Breaching the Chinese Wall: Cross-Market Information Flow Following Financial Institution Mergers" by Ehsan Mahdikhani Stockholm School of Economics Abstract How does access to private loan information affect institutional investors' equity returns? Exploiting mergers between asset managers and lenders as a plausibly exogenous shock to loan-side information access, we find that after gaining access institutional investors earn higher abnormal equity returns: within institutions, managers earn 3.1 pp higher annualized returns on stocks for which they have loan-side access than on their other holdings without such access, and across institutions trading the same stock, informed managers outperform equity-only peers by 1.7 pp annualized, consistent with debt positions conferring information unavailable to pure shareholders. Mechanism tests show larger gains when financial-reporting covenants…
