We explore a novel survey on responsible investing by institutional investors around the world and match it to archival data on their equity portfolio holdings. We document that institutions that publicly commit to responsible investing exhibit better environmental, social, and governance (ESG)...

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...

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...

We examine international equity allocations at the fund level and show how different returns on the foreign and domestic proportion of portfolios determine rebalancing behavior and trigger capital flows. We document the heterogeneity of rebalancing across fund types, its greater intensity under...

What do asset managers believe regarding the financial performance of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investment strategies? We address this question by exploring the relationship between fund managers’ co-ownership and portfolio ESG performance. Managers with more “skin in the...

We document a curious feature of the German mutual fund industry. Unlike U.S. mutual funds, funds domiciled in Germany do not necessarily compute their net asset values (NAV) as of market close. Using a sample of German equity funds, we infer each fund's NAV closing time from the best-fit market...

We use a new data set to study the determinants of the performance of open-end actively managed equity mutual funds in 27 countries. We find that mutual funds underperform the market overall. The results show important differences in the determinants of fund performance in the U.S. and elsewhere...

Active fund managers implicitly promise to research profitable portfolio selection. But active management is an experience good subject to moral hazard. Investors cannot tell high from low quality up front and therefore fear manager shirking. We show how the parties mitigate the moral hazard by...