Firms' competitive advantages are unsustainable when competitors poach their employees away to study and recreate those advantages. We document inter-firm knowledge spillovers through labor mobility in the mutual fund industry. About one quarter of the competitive advantage of the originating...

We examine the impact of ETF ownership on the commonality in liquidity of underlying stocks, while controlling for other institutional ownership. Analyses using aggregate stock-level ETF ownership and common ETF ownership at the stock-pair level indicate that ETF ownership significantly...

Firms' competitive advantages are unsustainable when competitors poach their employees away to learn about their organization processes. We document inter-firm knowledge spillovers through such personnel moves in the mutual fund industry. Almost two thirds of the competitive advantage of the...

To best utilize labor, companies need to match employees’ skills with jobs that best fit those skills. Exploiting unique features of the mutual fund industry, we identify instances when this matching happens for fund managers and study its consequences. After fund managers are matched, they...

We show that mutual funds report their junior stakes in startups at 43% higher valuation than model fair values that consider multi-tier capital structures of startups. The latest-issued and most senior security is worth 48% per share than junior securities held by mutual funds, implying that...

Using the recent AAPI Hate around 2020-2021 as an exogenous shock, we show that sociopolitical racial animus impairs the performance of mutual funds managed by at least one Asian female manager, the most targeted group by the Hate-induced violence. The decline in performance is greater in states...

Using a comprehensive database of corporate news, we find that bond funds trade against the direction of news sentiment. The trading against news phenomenon is concentrated in funds selling on positive news and in the post-financial crisis period when dealer liquidity provision is constrained....

In this paper I investigate the investment behavior of SRI investors based on SRI mutual fund flows. Specifically, I analyze how SRI investors react to past performance and ethical standards. This empirical study shows that over the years along with the development of the SRI fund market, the...

This paper introduces two measures to investigate potential window-dressing behavior among mutual fund managers. We show that unskilled managers that perform poorly are more likely to window dress by strategically purchasing winner stocks and selling loser stocks near quarter ends. Further,...

Expected returns can hardly be estimated from time series data. Therefore, many recent papers suggest investing in the global minimum variance portfolio. The weights of this portfolio depend only on the return variances and covariances, but not on the expected returns. The weights of the global...