We exploit the staggered introduction of index funds in different segments and countries to study how increased competition from indexing affects the performance-flow relation and incentives of actively managed equity mutual funds. An increase in the market shares of available country-level...

We exploit variation in the ancestries of U.S. equity mutual fund managers to show that ancestry affects portfolio decisions. Controlling for fund firm location, we find that funds overweight stocks from their managers’ ancestral home countries in their non-U.S. portfolio by 132 bps or 20.34%...

We study whether hedge funds make charitable donations to further their business interests. We find that donations are driven by poor fund flows and performance. Post-donation, donor funds experience lower outflows compared to matched non-donors. One-off donations and donations to charities...

We show that early-life family disruption (death or divorce of a parent) causes fund managers to be more risk averse when they manage their own funds. Treated managers take lower systematic, idiosyncratic, and downside risk than non-treated managers. This effect is most pronounced for managers...

We show a long-lasting association between a common societal phenomenon, early-life family disruption, and investment behavior. Fund managers who experienced the death or divorce of their parents during childhood take lower risk and are more likely to sell their holdings following riskincreasing...

We show that investors acquire more public information about firms to which they are more socially proximate. On average, a standard deviation increase in the Social Connectedness Index (Bailey et al., 2018) between a firm's headquarter county and a searcher county is associated with 30% more...

The rare disaster hypothesis suggests that the extraordinarily high postwar U.S. equity premium resulted because investors ex ante demanded compensation for unlikely but calamitous risks that they happened not to incur. Although convincing in theory, empirical tests of the rare disaster...

The long-run consumption risk (LRR) model is a promising approach to resolve prominent asset pricing puzzles. The simulated method of moments (SMM) provides a natural framework to estimate its deep parameters, but caveats concern model solubility and weak identification. We propose a twostep...

This paper investigates whether multivariate crash risk (MCRASH), defined as exposure to extreme realizations of multiple systematic factors, is priced in the cross-section of expected stock returns. We derive an extended linear model with a positive premium for MCRASH and we empirically confirm...

Risk-adjusted momentum returns are usually estimated by sorting stocks into a regularly rebalanced long-short portfolio based on their prior return and then running a full-sample regression of the portfolio returns on a set of factors (portfolio-level risk adjustment). This approach implicitly...