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...

"This paper studies how portfolios with a global investment scope are actually allocated internationally using a unique micro dataset on U.S. equity mutual funds. While mutual funds have great flexibility to invest globally, they invest in a surprisingly limited number of stocks, around 100. The...

This paper examines asset fire sales, and institutional price pressure more generally, in equity markets, using market prices of mutual fund transactions caused by capital flows from 1980 to 2003. Funds experiencing large outflows (inflows) tend to decrease (increase) existing positions, which...

This paper compares investor sentiment measures based on consumer confidence surveys with measures extracted from the closed-end fund discount (CEFD). Our evidence suggests that these two kinds of sentiment measures do not correlate well with one another. For a short 2 - 4 year period in which...

Mutual fund managers may decide to deviate from a well-diversified portfolio and concentrate their holdings in industries where they have informational advantages. In this paper, we study the relation between the industry concentration and the performance of actively managed U.S. mutual funds...

We test whether fund managers have stock-picking skill by comparing their holdings and trades prior to earnings announcements with the returns realized at those events. This approach largely avoids the joint-hypothesis problem with long-horizon studies of fund performance. Consistent with...

The discount on closed-end funds is widely accepted as proof of investor irrationality. We show,however, that a parsimonious rational model can generate a discount that exhibits many of the characteristics observed in practice. The only required features of the model are that managers have...

The majority of asset-management intermediaries (e.g., mutual funds, hedge funds) are structured on an open-end basis, even though it appears that the open-end form can be a serious impediment to arbitrage. I argue that the equilibrium degree of open-ending in an economy can be excessive from...

This paper investigates the performance of private equity partnerships using a data set of individual fund returns collected by Venture Economics. Over the sample period, average fund returns net of fees approximately equal the S\&P 500 although there is a large degree of heterogeneity. Returns...

Two salient features of the competitive structure of the U.S. mutual fund industry are the large number of funds and the sizeable dispersion in the fees funds charge investors, even within narrow asset classes. Portfolio financial performance differences alone do not seem able to fully explain...