Standard Fama-French and Carhart models produce economically and statistically significant nonzero alphas even for passive benchmark indices such as the S&P 500 and Russell 2000. We find that these alphas primarily arise from the disproportionate weight the Fama-French factors place on small...

In this paper, we investigate the performance-growth relation of French mutual funds. Using panel techniques, we find that capital inflows to French past top performing funds are not as strong as expected. This result suggests that there exist barriers to investment, that may come from the fact...

Using a novel database, we show that the stock-price impact of analyst trade ideas is at least as large as the impact of stock recommendation, target price, and earnings forecast changes, and that investors following trade ideas can earn significant abnormal returns. Trade ideas triggered by...

Have Italian mutual funds been able to generate “extra-return”? Were some of them able to persistently beat the competitors? In this paper we address these questions and provide a detailed and systematic performance and return persistence analysis of the Italian equity mutual funds. We show...

Is there a gap between the profitability of a trading strategy “on paper” and that which is achieved in practice? We answer this question by developing a general technique to measure the real-world implementation costs of financial market anomalies. Our method extends Fama-MacBeth...

We decompose the conditional expected mutual fund return in five parts. Two parts, selectivity and expert market timing, can be attributed to manager skill, and three to variation in market exposure that can be achieved by private investors as well. The dynamic model that we use to estimate the...

We decompose the conditional expected mutual fund return in ve parts.Two parts, selectivity and expert market timing, can be attributed to manager skill, and three to variation in market exposure that can be achieved by private investors as well.The dynamic model that we use to estimate the...

This paper proposes a new holding horizon (HH) measure of active management and examines the relation between horizon and manager skill. Our HH measure identifies, in the cross-section, funds with higher future long-term alphas, while reported turnover identifies, in the time-series, when a...

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance of US mutual funds that invest primarily in emerging market equities and bonds. Design/methodology/approach - The study adopts the Morningstar classification of mutual funds and uses the Lipper US Mutual Fund Database through...

This paper proposes several new holdings-based measures of fund investment horizon, and examines the relation between manager skills and fund holding horizon. We find that both aggregate holdings and trades of long-horizon funds are informative about superior future long-term stock returns,...