The interplay between investors' demand and providers' incentives has shaped the evolution of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). While early ETFs offered diversification at low cost, later ETFs track niche portfolios and charge high fees. Strikingly, over their first five years, specialized ETFs lose...

Some investment advisors offer multiple versions of a fund with the same manager and highly correlated returns. But these twinʺ funds are separate portfolios for different investors with differing abilities to select and monitor managers. Using a matched sample of retail and institutional twin...

We show that mutual funds compete for climate-conscious investment flows. In April 2018, Morningstar introduced a climate-focused label for mutual funds. The release of the "Low Carbon Designation" induced reactions on both the demand and supply sides of the market. First, investors flocked to...

This paper develops a simple technique that controls for ldquo;false discoveries,rdquo; or mutual funds that exhibit significant alphas by luck alone. Our approach precisely separates funds into (1) unskilled, (2) zero-alpha, and (3) skilled funds, even with dependencies in cross-fund estimated...

We develop a principal-agent model based on a sequential game played by a representative investor and a fund manager in an asymmetric information framework. The model shows that investors' perceptions of the fund market play the key role in the fund's fee-setting mechanism. The managers' true...

This paper provides evidence for a causal effect of equity prices on corporate investment and employment. We use fire sales by distressed equity funds during the 2007--2009 financial crisis to identify substantial exogenous underpricing. Firms whose stocks are most underpriced have considerably...

This paper explores the incentives for mutual funds to trade with sibling funds affiliated with the same group. To this end, we construct a dataset of almost one million equity transactions and compare the pricing of trades crossed internally (cross-trades) with that of twin trades executed with...

We propose a novel methodology that jointly estimates the proportions of skilled/unskilled funds and the cross-sectional distribution of skill in the mutual fund industry. We model this distribution as a three-component mixture of a point mass at zero and two components — one negative, one...

Why do investors keep buying underperforming mutual funds? To address this issue, we develop a one-period principal-agent model with a representative investor and a fund manager in an asymmetric information framework. This model shows that the investors perception of the fund plays the key role...

This paper proposes a model of asset-market equilibrium with portfolio delegation and optimal fee contracts. Fund managers and investors strategically interact to determine funds' investment profiles, while they share portfolio risk through fee contracts. In equilibrium, their investment...