Sophisticated and Unsophisticated Runs

Cipriani, Marco; La Spada, Gabriele

Report

Sophisticated and Unsophisticated Runs

Abstract: What makes investors run? We show that during the March 2020 run on prime money market funds, institutional and retail investors behaved in dramatically different ways: sophisticated institutional investors ran preemptively based on fundamentals; unsophisticated retail investors ran based on herd-like informational spillovers, leaving funds belonging to families with large institutional outflows. We show that based on website traffic, institutional investors acquired more information on fund portfolios; furthermore, we show that within-family institutional outflows were informative to retail investors. Both investor types ran more if switching to a safer investment was cheaper, suggesting that safe-haven availability exacerbates run.

Keywords: runs; COVID-19; money market funds; sophisticated investors; regulation;

JEL Classification: E41; G23; G28;