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 provides implied measures of higher-order dependencies between assets. The measures exploit only forward-looking information from the options market and can be used to construct an implied estimator of the covariance, co-skewness, and co-kurtosis matrices of asset returns. We...

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 provides implied measures of higher-order dependencies between assets. These measures exploit only forward-looking information from the options market and can be used to construct an implied estimator of the full covariance, co-skewness, and co-kurtosis matrices of asset returns. In...

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

Diversification benefits depend on the correlation between assets. Unfortunately, asset correlation increases when it is most needed. We examine bond correlation using a broad sample of US corporate bonds. We find bond correlation to be higher during the financial crisis in 2008. Increased bond...

Based on the records of 1183 individual fund managers from 1985 to 2010, we investigate the compensation and discipline mechanisms in the closed-end fund industry and their implications for manager performance and fund premium. We find that managers generating high surplus, as proxied by fund...