We document that the speed of information dissemination within mutual fund families positively affects the performance of member funds. This suggests that the resulting benefits of higher information precision far outweigh free-riding costs associated with fast internal dissemination. The...

Rationality would suggest that advice-seeking investors receive benefits from costly financial advice. However, evidence documenting these benefits for U.S. investors has so far been lacking. This paper is the first to document that U.S. mutual fund investors indeed receive one of the many...

We evaluate how different betas and characteristics related to default, term, and liquidity risk fare against one another in explaining the cross-section of corporate bond returns. We find that characteristics-credit rating, duration, and Amihud illiquidity measure-fare better. Yields add...

Sexual harassment, a widespread problem in the workplace, arguably keeps female employees from optimally employing their human capital. We show that removing or diminishing this friction improves productivity. Specifically, using the male-dominated fund industry as our testing ground, we show...

This paper examines how labor mobility restrictions such as non-compete clauses in employment contracts affect the incentives and resulting behavior of employees. Using the investment industry as a testing laboratory, we find that mutual fund managers respond to heightened career concerns due to...

Firms’ competitive advantages are unsustainable when competitors poach their employees away to study and recreate those advantages. We document inter-firm knowledge spillovers through labor mobility in the mutual fund industry. About one quarter of the competitive advantage of the originating...

This paper investigates investment strategies that exploit the low-beta anomaly. Although the notion of buying low-beta stocks and selling high-beta stocks is natural, a choice is necessary with respect to the relative weighting of high-beta stocks and low-beta stocks in the investment...

Section 529 plans have experienced tremendous growth, yet we know little about how the incentives of their sponsors (i.e., states) and program managers affect investors. We study how the incentives of these key players relate to plan characteristics. Plans where states exhibit a greater tendency...

To best utilize labor, companies need to match employees' skills with jobs that best fit those skills. Exploiting unique features of the mutual fund industry, we identify instances when this matching happens for fund managers and study its consequences. After fund managers are matched, they...

Using a novel return-based method to detect allocations of corporate bond offerings, which are underpriced on average, we find that mutual funds most active in the primary market generate significant alpha and outperform those that are less active. Our evidence suggests that underwriters direct...