This paper examines institutional price pressure in equity markets by studying mutual fund transactions caused by capital flows from 1980 to 2004. Funds experiencing large outflows tend to decrease existing positions, which creates price pressure in the securities held in common by distressed funds. Similarly, the tendency among funds experiencing large inflows to expand existing positions creates positive price pressure in overlapping holdings. Investors who trade against constrained mutual funds earn significant returns for providing liquidity. In addition, future flow-driven transactions are predictable, creating an incentive to front-run the anticipated forced trades by funds experiencing extreme capital flows.

This paper proposes a new framework for understanding financial intermediation. In contrast to previous research, we consider a setting in which intermediaries possess no inherent information processing or monitoring advantages. Instead, in an economy with overly optimistic entrepreneurs who require funding from pessimistic investors, we show that intermediaries can arise endogenously. In such a setting, only a rational intermediary will be sufficiently optimistic to find it worthwhile to invest in a technology for screening entrepreneurs' projects, and yet be pessimistic enough to use this technology. Our framework produces implications consistent with heretofore unexplained stylized facts, and conjectures which are thus far untested.