This article examines the risk and return characteristics of U.S. mutual funds. We employ an equilibrium version of the Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) and a principal-components-based statistical technique to identify performance benchmarks. We also consider the Capital Asset Pricing Model...

This paper provides a mathematical proof and theoretical analysis of the one-to-one consistency between higher-order Omega and Almost Stochastic Dominance rules when evaluating fund performance. The consistency between higher-order Omega and Almost Nth-degree Stochastic Dominance reinforces the...

What do asset managers believe regarding the financial performance of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investment strategies? We address this question by exploring the relationship between fund managers’ co-ownership and portfolio ESG performance. Managers with more “skin in the...

We investigate the occurrence of greenwashing in the US mutual fund industry. Using panel regression methods, we test whether there exist differences in the portfolio investment behaviors of active equity funds that are self-declared to be driven by ESG motives when compared to all other funds....

To many people, the terror of falling share prices is often significant, often more so than the pleasure of gains. Accordingly, investors often want to minimize downside volatility as a part of their portfolio planning. Investors already have several tools to measure downside volatility,...

This paper develops a diagnostic tool for candidate performance measures that accounts for investor disagreement in mutual funds. We compare the evaluation for best clienteles, specified by an upper admissible performance bound, to the one for representative investors implicit in twelve models....

Which factor model do investors in corporate bonds use? We examine this question by tracking investors' decisions to invest in actively managed corporate bond mutual funds with a revealed preference approach. Our main result is that all bond factor models are dominated by the simple Sharpe...

The on-going debate over whether fund managers have skills and whether those skills are short-lived is still inconclusive. Using the performance measure that can't be manipulated with respect to the underlying distribution, time variation, nor estimation error, (the manipulation-proof...