Lower skill of the active management industry can imply greater fee revenue, value added, and investor performance. Such outcomes arise in a competitive equilibrium in which portfolio choices of active managers partially echo those of noise traders and also contain manager-specific noise. Both...

We take a deeper look at the robustness of evidence presented by Pastor, Stambaugh, and Taylor (2015) and Zhu (2018), who find that an actively managed mutual fund's returns relate negatively to both fund size and the size of the active mutual fund industry. When we apply robust regression...

We study tradeoffs among active mutual funds' characteristics. In both our equilibrium model and the data, funds with larger size, lower expense ratio, and higher turnover hold more-liquid portfolios. Portfolio liquidity, a concept introduced here, depends not only on the liquidity of the...

We estimate financial institutions' portfolio tilts that relate to stocks' environmental, social, and governance (ESG) characteristics. We find ESG-related tilts totaling 6% of the investment industry's assets under management in 2021. ESG tilts are significant at both the extensive margin...

Extremely long odds accompany the chance that spurious-regression bias accounts for investor sentiment's observed role in stock-return anomalies. We replace investor sentiment with a simulated persistent series in regressions reported by Stambaugh, Yu and Yuan (2012), who find higher long-short...

We argue that active management's popularity is not puzzling despite the industry's poor track record. Our explanation features decreasing returns to scale: As the industry's size increases, every manager's ability to outperform passive benchmarks declines. The poor track record occurred before...