This paper develops a simple technique that controls for false discoveries, or mutual funds that exhibit significant alphas by luck alone. Our approach precisely separates funds into (1) unskilled, (2) zero-alpha, and (3) skilled funds, even with dependencies in cross-fund estimated alphas. We...

This paper develops two measures of performance inconsistency based on information derived from funds' actual performance and their disclosed portfolio holdings. Using these measures, we show that funds with unskilled managers and poor performance are associated with greater inconsistency....

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...

This paper implements strategies that use macroeconomic variables to select European equity mutual funds, including Pan-European, country, and sector funds. We find that several macro-variables are useful in locating funds with future outperformance, and that countryspecific mutual funds provide...

This experimental study investigates the impact of affective attitudes on risk and return estimates of stocks. Participants rate well-known blue-chip firms on an affective scale and forecast risk and return of the firms' stock. We find that positive affective attitudes lead to a prediction of...

Expected returns can hardly be estimated from time series data. Therefore, many recent papers suggest investing in the global minimum variance portfolio. The weights of this portfolio depend only on the return variances and covariances, but not on the expected returns. The weights of the global...

Recently there has been a rapid growth in the assets managed by hedged mutual funds - mutual funds mimicking hedge funds strategies. In this paper, we examine the performance of these funds relative to hedge funds and traditional mutual funds. We find that despite their use of similar trading...

More and more investors apply socially responsible screens when building their stock portfolios. This raises the question whether these investors can increase their performance by incorporating such screens into their investment process. To answer this question we implement a simple trading...

We test the frequently made claim that SRI funds are conventional funds in disguise. For this purpose, we compare the portfolio holdings of SRI funds to conventional funds concerning their social and environmental standards. Our empirical study of US equity funds shows that SRI funds have a...

We provide a rationale for window dressing where investors respond to conflicting signals of managerial ability inferred from a fund's performance and disclosed portfolio holdings. We contend that window dressers take a risky bet on their performance during a reporting delay period, which...