This is the first study of corporate-bond mutual fund performance that examines detailed security-level holdings and returns. The new database allows us to decompose the costs and benefits of active management. In contrast to prior research on equity funds that shows evidence of stock-selection...

This paper investigates the returns and flows of German money market funds before and during the liquidity crisis of 2007/2008. The main findings of this paper are: in liquid times, money market funds enhanced their returns by investing in less liquid papers. By doing so they outperformed other...

This paper investigates the purchases and redemptions of a large cross-sectional sample of German equity funds. We find that investors punish bad performance by selling their shares, but also have a tendency to sell winners. Investors in large fund families show higher sales and redemption...

This paper analyzes the performance of portfolio strategies that invest in noload, open-end U.S. domestic equity mutual funds, incorporating predictability in (i) manager skills, (ii) fund risk-loadings, and (iii) benchmark returns. Predictability in manager skills is found to be the dominant...

In this paper, we apply Markowitz's approach of portfolio selection to government bond portfolios. As a main feature of our analysis, we use term structure models to estimate expected returns, return variances, and covariances of different bonds. Our empirical study for the German market shows...

This paper provides new evidence supporting the rationality of closed-end fund discounts by analyzing the time-series dynamics of individual fund discounts and their relation to portfolio performance and manager turnover. We show that discount changes reflect rational investor learning about...

This paper studies the hedging of price risk when payment dates are uncertain, a problem that frequently occurs in practice. It derives and establishes the variance minimizing dynamic hedging strategy, using forward contracts with different times to maturity. The resulting strategy fully hedges...

We analyze the impact of market frictions on trading volume and liquidity premia for finite maturity assets when investors differ in their investment horizons. In equilibrium, illiquidity spills over from short-term to long-term assets and trading concentrates on assets of intermediate maturity....

This paper shows that portfolio constraints have important implications for management compensation and performance evaluation. In particular, in the presence of portfolio constraints, allowing for benchmarking can be bene cial. Benchmark design arises as an alternative effort inducement...

We show that fund families allocate their fund managers to different market segments such that their skill is rewarded best. Whether a fund manager's skill is rewarded by higher alpha depends on the efficiency of the market segment in which she works. Even skilled managers can generate alpha...