Data economy and financial markets

Zanotti, Marco

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Doctoral thesis

Data economy and financial markets : theory and evidence

Zanotti, Marco
Frésard, Laurent (Degree supervisor)
Plazzi, Alberto (Degree committee member)

2026

PhD: Università della Svizzera italiana

Information and financial markets

English This dissertation studies how growing data availability and advances in information technologies reshape the interaction between firms and financial markets. In three chapters, I examine how technologies that reduce the cost of collecting and processing information affect asset managers’ competition for capital, corporate managers’ reliance on stock prices, and the informativeness of prices when firms themselves gain access to better data. Chapter 1, “Asset (and Data) Managers,” studies whether asset managers use customer data to attract capital. Using website-code data to identify the adoption of tools such as Google Analytics and A/B testing, I show that adopting funds attract 1.5% higher annual flows and charge higher fees, despite no improvement in performance. The effects are concentrated among retail investors and weaken as competitors adopt similar technologies, suggesting that data improve funds’ ability to market and sell existing products rather than investment performance. Chapter 2, co-authored with Laurent Frésard, examines how customer-data technologies affect firms’ use of financial-market information. After adoption, firms’ investment becomes less sensitive to their stock prices. Consistent with a model in which internal data improve managers’ forecasts of future demand, these technologies partially replace the informational role of stock prices in guiding investment. Chapter 3 studies the other side of learning: how firms’ access to better data affects the information contained in stock prices. I develop a model in which more precise internal data increase firms’ public disclosure, but disclosure generates derivative content that can raise investors’ information-production costs. When this externality is sufficiently strong, better firm data reduce price informativeness. Together, Chapters 2 and 3 show that the data economy changes both what firms learn from markets and what markets learn from firms.

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