This paper represents the first specific attempt in the literature to examine the relationship between active share and emerging market equity fund performance. Using a sample of U.S. based diversified emerging market equity funds whose prospectus benchmark is the MSCI emerging market equity...

Closet indexing is the practice of staying close to the benchmark index while still maintaining to be an active mutual fund manager and probably also charging fees similar to those of truly active managers. Recent work shows active mutual fund managers were much more likely to closet index...

There are several reasons why mutual fund corporate culture should predict fund performance. First, at funds with excellent corporate cultures, employees are recognized for their contributions and are involved in decision making. This usually translates into employees working harder, being more...

Some active mutual funds are more active than others. Indeed, research has found that many so-called active funds are not nearly as active as they appear as they hold a portfolio that can be quite similar to their benchmark index. Furthermore it has generally been found that funds who are...

This paper utilizes a new data set from AllianceBernstein that, unlike other corporate governance data, has monthly-updated firm-level governance ratings for 21 emerging markets countries for almost a five year period. With these unique data, we examine how changes in corporate governance...

This paper examines the ability of well known mutual fund characteristics, including the expense ratio, turnover, fund size, recent past performance, manager tenure, and Morningstar mutual fund star ratings, to predict emerging market mutual fund performance. We form three separate samples of...

We perform an extensive examination of how the new Morningstar rating system, introduced in June 2002, predicts future fund performance. Specifically, we examine all domestic equity funds that were rated by Morningstar as of June 30, 2002. We then examine the performance of these funds over the...

This paper represents the first attempt, to our knowledge, to empirically examine the relationship between the quality of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) education and firm performance. This is an important question as many papers in the management literature have postulated that managers with...

We use loan-specific data to document a significant inverse relationship between a firm's dividend payouts and the intensity of a firm's reliance on bank loan financing. Banks limit dividend payouts to shareholders in order to protect the integrity of their senior claims on the firm's assets....

This paper uses a proprietary database of asset-backed securities (ABS) to make two contributions to the literature: A detailed descriptive analysis of the ABS market and an investigation of the factors that influence underwriting fees in the ABS market. Using methodology similar to that used in...