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 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...

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...

We investigate the market-compatible degree of agent heterogeneity by identifying and analyzing the full range of conditional beliefs consistent with observed asset prices and good-deal bounds. Our methodology neither makes assumptions on underlying processes nor does it use survey data. It can...

This article analyzes the effect of liquidity risk on the performance of various hedge fund portfolio strategies. Similarly to Avramov et al. (2007), we find that, before accounting for the effect of liquidity risk, hedge fund portfolios that incorporate predictability in managerial skills...

We use transaction data gathered by a large fintech firm to study retail investors’ investments in cryptocurrencies. Crypto investors tend to be young, male, high-income, and live in wealthy urban areas with high levels of self-employment and low levels of altruism. Crypto investments are...