We study the long-run outcomes associated with hedge funds' compensation structure. Over a 22-year period, the aggregate effective incentive fee rate is 2.5 times the average contractual rate (i.e., around 50% instead of 20%). Overall, investors collected 36 cents for every dollar earned on...

Rational investors should account for risk factor exposure when allocating capital to mutual funds. Two recent influential studies use mutual fund flows to test whether investors distinguish between performance driven by managers' skill and systematic risk factors. Both studies found that...

We infer the role of price expectations in forming the U.S. housing boom in the early-2000s from examining housing inventories. We use a reduced form model to show that agents invest in vacant homes when they anticipate prices will increase. Empirically, vacancy can discriminate between price...

The moral hazard incentives of the bank safety net predict that distressed banks take on more risk and higher leverage. Since many factors reduce these incentives, including charter value, regulation, and managerial incentives, the net economic effect of these incentives is an empirical...

FinTech lending—known for using big data and advanced technologies—promised to break away from the traditional credit scoring and pricing models. Using a comprehensive dataset of FinTech personal loans, our study shows that loan rates continue to rely heavily on conventional credit scores,...

Textbook theory assumes that firm managers maximize the net present value of future cash flows. But when you ask them, the people running large public corporations say that they are maximizing something else entirely: earnings per share (EPS). Perhaps this is a mistake. No matter. We take...