Frequent, yet uninformed, market timing recommendations by a financial advisory firm generate significant flows for Chilean pension funds. These flows induce substantial changes in the Chilean foreign exchange rate due to the funds’ high allocation to international securities. Local banks provide liquidity to pension funds in the spot market and their hedging transactions propagate the demand fluctuations from the spot to the forward market, resulting in deviations from covered interest rate parity. Using bank balance sheet data, we confirm that banks’ risk bearing constraints create limits to arbitrage.

We examine the effects of a 2012 regulatory reform that mandated fee and performance disclosures for the investment options in 401(k) plans. We show that participants became significantly more attentive to expense ratios and short-term performance after the reform. The disclosure effects are stronger among plans with large average contributions per participant and are weaker for plans with many investment options. Additionally, these results are not driven by secular changes in investor behavior or sponsor-initiated changes to the investment menus. Our findings suggest that providing salient fee and performance information can mitigate participants inertia in retirement plans.

We show that mutual funds worldwide provide substantial international exposure through their domestic holdings of multinationals. The international exposure of domestic funds increases, on average, by 32 percentage points when we consider international corporate diversification. We find that funds with higher indirect international exposure perform better in both the cross-section and the time series. This effect is primarily driven by the fund managers’ ability to invest in multinationals, rather than the performance of those multinationals. Our findings support the hypothesis that international diversification from multinationals reduces the transaction and information costs of investing abroad.