Granular institutional investors and global market interdependence

We study the propagation of global investment risk across markets through the granular view of institutional investors. Applying the conditional value-at-risk estimation to micro-level weekly observations of international mutual funds between 2003 and 2011, we find that idiosyncratic shocks to large institutional investors explain both aggregate market risk and cross-market risk interdependence. Conditional on the US capital markets being in financial distress, idiosyncratic shocks to the top 10% largest funds investing in the US explain about 40% of the risk fluctuations in other non-US markets. The findings are also economically and statistically significant for the top largest funds investing in non-US markets, with the effects becoming especially large during the global financial crisis of 2007–09. These results are robust after controlling for common risk factors and applying alternative measures of idiosyncratic shocks.