An emulation fund is designed to reduce trading activity, thereby lowering costs, for a multi-manager fund. It does this by delaying, and potentially combining, trading decisions from each employed fund manager to eliminate offsetting trades (e.g. one manager may buy a stock for her fund while...

We investigate why investors may be willing to participate in active management, notwithstanding that the average manager is likely to generate negative alpha after fees. We model the alpha an investor expects from a dynamic strategy of investing in a portfolio of active investment managers, and...

Institutional brokerage rates have been in decline. We investigate whether this reduction has coincided with a fall in benefits provided by brokers to institutional asset managers. We use trade packages from both active and passive equity funds from 1995 to 2001, and active equity funds from...

Emulation funds are a potentially cost-effective way for multi-manager funds to improve their investment performance by delaying and netting trade signals from underlying managers. We develop a model to represent the expected sources of differential performance in an emulation fund relative to...

Financial uncertainty and macroeconomic uncertainty are commonly proxied separately by the volatility of stock returns or key macroeconomic variables, respectively. We propose a portfolio-based measure (PBMEU) that aims to capture aggregate uncertainty in both financial markets and the...

This paper summarizes views on the superannuation system and its regulation collected through interviews of fund executives. While the majority of interviewees saw the superannuation system as working relatively well, some areas of concern were detected. Issues raised relate to: certain aspects...

We interview professional institutional investors to learn how they choose between active and passive management, select active equity managers and construct multi-manager portfolios. We find that many of the aspects emphasized in the fund management literature, such as returns generated by the...

We combine survey data from retirement plan members with information from interviews with plan executives to get both perspectives on who accepts the default plan and default investment option and why. We use a natural experiment in default construction where a new regulatory framework required...

We interview Australian fund executives about how their organisations responded to MySuper, a regulatory framework for default retirement savings funds that providers were required to have in place by the beginning of 2014. In addition to providing an account of the influences on product design...

Using a unique database of daily transactions from Australian equity managers, we investigate the relation between institutional trading and share returns. The 34 institutional investors included in our sample exhibit a statistically and economically significant ability to predict large...