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...

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...

Rapid Trading, d.h. der kurzfristige Kauf und Verkauf von Fondsanteilen durch Fondsinvestoren, steht im Widerspruch zur Fondskonzeption, wonach Fonds Instrumente zum langfristigen Vermögensaufbau darstellen, und kann zu negativen Auswirkungen auf die Performance führen. Wir verwenden Daten...

Mutual funds are part of larger organizations, which make decisions with consequences for all their member funds. This study examines how the efficiency of trading desks operated by fund families affects the performance and trading of affiliated funds. We introduce a novel approach to measure...

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,...

Whether financial advisors provide useful services for clients that seek to invest in mutual funds remains an open question. We are the first to show that financial advisors generate tangible benefits for their clients in the form of useful tax advice. Specifically, financial advisors help...

We develop a new family of estimators of the covariance matrix that relies solely on forwardlooking information. It uses only current prices of plain-vanilla options. In an out-of-sample study we show that a minimum-variance strategy based on these fully-implied estimators outperforms several...