Recently there has been increased interest in wealth taxes, which tax the value of personal assets. Although wealth taxes have advantages relative to income taxes, wealth taxes also can create problematic administrative and compliance issues. This article examines a nearly 1400-year-old wealth...

People regularly rely upon advisors who have conflicts of interest. The law often requires the advisors to disclose these conflicts. However, the very fact that the advisor is disclosing a conflict of interest might be interpreted by some people as a sign that the advisor is trustworthy,...

Mutual fund companies routinely advertise the past returns of their strong-performing, actively-managed equity funds. These performance advertisements imply that the advertised high past returns are likely to continue. Indeed, investors flock to these funds despite high past returns being a poor...

More than $11 trillion is invested in mutual funds in the United States. Mutual fund investors flock to funds with high past returns, despite there being little, if any, relationship between high past returns and high future returns. Because fund management fees are based on the amount of assets...

Mutual fund incubation is a process by which new funds are initially operated out of public view. The high-performing funds are then marketed to investors, and the low-performing funds are quietly terminated. This selection process is not revealed to investors, thus creating the illusion that...

Mutual funds are owned by almost half of all U.S. households, manage nearly $12 trillion dollars in assets, and have become a primary vehicle for retirement and investment savings in the United States. Who are mutual fund investors? The answer is critical to regulatory policy for the mutual fund...

Sell-side securities analysts who recommend stocks that they own have a conflict of interest. If investors buy the stocks in response to the analysts' recommendations, the stocks' prices will rise, increasing the analysts' personal wealth. Thus, analysts are legally required to disclose...

Much attention is being focused on the conflicts of interest of many research analysts' who recommend stocks for investors. These research analysts work for financial institutions that also have investment banking departments. As a result, these analysts have faced great pressure to write...

A utility-maximizing model of judicial behavior predicts that, all else equal, judges who have stronger preferences for publishing opinions, who have lighter workloads, or who are able to write publishable decisions more efficiently are more likely to publish their decisions. Using federal...