During the past few decades, the fraction of the equity market owned directly by individuals declined significantly. The same period witnessed investment trends that include the growth of indexing as well as shifts by active managers toward lower fees and more index-like investing. I develop an...

Using the dollar-value a mutual fund manager adds as the measure of skill, we find that not only does skill exist (the average mutual fund manager adds about $2 million per year), but this skill is persistent, as far out as 10 years. We further document that investors recognize this skill and...

We study a decentralized investment problem in which a CIO employs multiple asset managers to implement and execute investment strategies in separate asset classes. The CIO allocates capital to the managers who, in turn, allocate these funds to the assets in their asset class. This two-step...

We propose a new method of testing asset pricing models that relies on using quantities rather than prices or returns. We use the capital flows into and out of mutual funds to infer which risk model investors use. We derive a simple test statistic that allows us to infer, from a set of candidate...

We establish an important role for the firm by studying capital reallocation decisions of mutual fund firms. At least 30% of the value mutual fund managers add can be attributed to the firm's role in efficiently allocating capital amongst its mutual fund managers. We find no evidence of a...

We empirically analyze the nature of returns to scale in active mutual fund management. We find strong evidence of decreasing returns at the industry level: As the size of the active mutual fund industry increases, a fund's ability to outperform passive benchmarks declines. At the fund level,...

We model optimal fund turnover in the presence of time-varying profit opportunities. Our model predicts a positive relation between an active fund's turnover and its subsequent benchmark-adjusted return. We find such a relation for equity mutual funds. This time-series relation between turnover...

We argue that active management's popularity is not puzzling despite the industry's poor track record. Our explanation features decreasing returns to scale: As the industry's size increases, every manager's ability to outperform passive benchmarks declines. The poor track record occurred before...

We study tradeoffs among active mutual funds' characteristics. In both our equilibrium model and the data, funds with larger size, lower expense ratio, and higher turnover hold more-liquid portfolios. Portfolio liquidity, a concept introduced here, depends not only on the liquidity of the...

This study explores the role of investor sentiment in a broad set of anomalies in cross-sectional stock returns. We consider a setting where the presence of market-wide sentiment is combined with the argument that overpricing should be more prevalent than underpricing, due to short-sale...