This paper identifies the impact of fluctuations in the supply of capital from mutual funds on municipal bond financing and makes three contributions to the literature. First, we develop an identification strategy based on the Morningstar rating methodology at the moment that funds reach 5 years...

Over the last two decades, the unprecedented increase in non-bank financial intermediation, particularly open-end mutual funds and ETFs, accounts for nearly half of the external financing flows to emerging markets exceeding cross-border lending by global banks. Evidence suggests that investment...

Recordkeepers in DC pension plans are often paid indirectly in the form of revenue sharing from third-party funds on the menu. We show that these arrangements affect the investment menu of 401(k) plans. Revenue-sharing funds are more likely to be added to the menu and are less likely to be...

Investment fund managers make asset allocation decisions on behalf of a significant segment of US households. To elucidate the incentives they operate under, as well as the income and career risks they face, we construct a unique and novel dataset, which encompasses detailed information on the...

The level of diseconomies of scale in asset management has important implications for tests of manager skill and the expected level of performance persistence. To identify the causal impact of fund size on future returns, we exploit the fact that small differences in returns can cause discrete...

We develop a new GMM-style methodology with good small-sample properties to assess the abnormal performance and risk exposure of a non-traded asset from a cross-section of cash flow data. We apply this method to a sample of 958 mature private equity funds spanning 24 years. Our methodology uses...

Since the after-fee returns of funds-of-funds are, on average, lower than hedge fund returns, it is easy to conclude that funds-of-funds do not add value compared to hedge funds. However, funds-of-funds should not be evaluated relative to hedge fund returns in publicly reported databases....

We investigate an index of returns on professionally managed currency funds and a subset of returns from 34 individual currency fund managers. Over the period 1990-2006, excess returns earned by currency fund managers have averaged 25 basis points per month. We examine the relationship of these...

We document that the observed persistence amongst the worst performing actively managed mutual funds is attributable to funds that have performed poorly both in the current and prior year. We demonstrate that this persistence results from an unwillingness of investors in these funds to respond...

We use mutual fund flows as a measure for individual investor sentiment for different stocks, and find that high sentiment predicts low future returns at long horizons. Fund flows are dumb money -- by reallocating across different mutual funds, retail investors reduce their wealth in the long...