General Partners (GPs) in private equity face a trade-off between focusing their skills and effort on fewer investments to earn higher returns, or investing more broadly to reduce risk through diversification. Using a novel, deal-level dataset of 5,925 global investments from 1999 to 2016, we...

Previous theoretical analyses of the capital gains tax have suggested that investors have considerable opportunity to avoid the tax. Yet, past empirical work has found relatively little evidence of such activity. Using a previously unavailable panel data set with a very large sample of...

This paper uses time-series data to investigate how changes in capital gains tax rates affect taxpayer compliance. It finds that a one percent increase in the marginal tax rate reduces voluntary compliance by between one half and one percent. These results confirm the findings of previous...

Mutual funds are pooled investment vehicles with diverse tax clienteles. Whereas many mutual funds are held primarily by taxable investors, a significant fraction of mutual fund assets are held in tax-qualified retirement accounts. Our paper investigates whether the characteristics, investment...

Capital gain distributions by mutual funds generate tax liability for taxable shareholders, thereby reducing their after-tax returns. Taxable investors who are considering purchasing fund shares around distribution dates have an incentive to delay their purchase until after the distribution,...

This paper studies the relation between individuals' mutual fund flows and fund characteristics, establishing three key results. First, consistent with tax motivations, individual investors are reluctant to sell mutual funds that have appreciated in value and are willing to sell losing funds....

Investment taxes have a substantial impact on the performance of taxable mutual fund investors. Mutual funds can reduce the tax burdens of their shareholders by avoiding securities that are heavily taxed and by avoiding realizing capital gains that trigger higher tax burdens to the funds'...

We provide an introduction to the use of return based style analysis of Sharpe (1992) in practice. We demonstrate the importance of selecting the right style benchmarks and how the use of inappropriate style benchmarks may lead to wrong conclusions. When style analysis is applied to sector...

The literature has not unambiguously established that a positive alpha, as traditionally measured, means that an investor would want to buy a fund. However, when alpha is defined using the client's marginal utility function, a client faced with a positive alpha would generally want to buy. When...

This paper describes the available data and research on venture capital investments and performance. We comment on the challenges inherent in those data and research as well as possible opportunities to do better