Both stock price synchronicity and crash risk are negatively related to the firm's ownership by dedicated institutional investors, which have strong incentive to monitor due to their large stake holdings and long investment horizons. In contrast, the relations become positive for transient institutional investors as they tend to trade rather than monitor. These findings suggest that institutional monitoring limits managers' extraction of the firm's cash flows, which reduces the firm-specific risk absorbed by managers, thereby leading to a lower R2. Moreover, institutional monitoring mitigates managerial bad-news hoarding, which results in a stock price crash when the accumulated bad news is finally released.

Corporate sponsors of defined benefit pension plans generally assume low investment risk when they have low funding ratios and high default risk, consistent with the risk management hypothesis. However, for financially distressed sponsors and sponsors that freeze, terminate, or convert defined benefit to defined contribution plans, the risk-shifting incentive (moral hazard) dominates. Pension fund risk-taking is also affected by labor unionization and sponsor incentives to maximize tax benefits, restore financial slack, and justify the accounting choices of pension assumptions. Sponsors shift toward an aggressive risk strategy when their pension plans emerge from underfunding, bankruptcy risk is reduced, or marginal tax rate decreases. Overall, we show that corporate sponsors adopt a dynamic risk-taking strategy in their pension fund investments.