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...

We develop a stock return-predictive measure based on an efficient aggregation of the portfolio holdings of all actively managed U.S. domestic equity mutual funds, and use this model to study the source of fund managers' stock-selection abilities. This generalized-inverse alpha (GIA) approach...

We apply a new bootstrap statistical technique to examine the performance of the U.S. openend, domestic-equity mutual fund industry over the 1975 to 2002 period. Specifically, we bootstrap the joint distribution of performance measures (\alphas) across all funds to determine whether managers of...

The equity style orientation of an institutional portfolio has a large influence on its yearly returns. This paper analyzes the causes and consequences of portfolio style drift among U.S. equity mutual funds by developing new portfolio holdings-based measures of drift. These holdingsbased...

This paper shows that publicly disclosed mutual fund portfolio holdings have investment value. Our approach is based on the intuition that an overweighting by successful managers, or an underweighting by unsuccessful managers signals that a stock is currently underpriced. Investment strategies...

Based on the records of 1183 individual fund managers from 1985 to 2010, we investigate the compensation and discipline mechanisms in the closed-end fund industry and their implications for manager performance and fund premium. We find that managers generating high surplus, as proxied by fund...

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...

Over the past 30 years, mutual funds have become the dominant vehicle through which individual investors prepare for retirement via defined contribution plans. Further, money market mutual funds, which hold $2.7 trillion as of September 2013, are now a major part of the cash economy in the U.S....

This paper studies daily investor flows to and from each money market mutual fund during the period prior to and including the money fund crisis of September and October 2008. We focus on the determinants of flows in the prime money fund category to shed light on the covariates of money fund...

This paper documents the tendency of mutual fund managers to follow analyst recommendation revisions when they trade stocks, and the impact of analyst revisioninduced mutual fund herds on stock prices. We find that mutual fund herds follow consensus revisions in analyst recommendations,...