We examine how a sample of publicly traded corporate bond issuers and institutional investors, namely corporate bond funds, assess the four major nationally recognized credit rating agencies and their role in capital markets. The results show that these issuers and institutional investors differ...

We examine the views of issuers of investment and non-investment grade industrial bonds about the four leading U.S. credit rating agencies. Based on a sample obtained from the Lehman Brothers database, we find that issuers of investment and non-investment grade bonds differ significantly in...

In this study, we provide extensive evidence on the performance and characteristics of 1,779 U.S. domestic, actively managed retail equity mutual funds. We find that expense ratios differ widely among Morningstar categories. Overall, our results indicate that funds with low expense ratios...

Given their simplicity and presumed commodity-like nature, institutional Samp;P 500 Index mutual funds should be subject to active price competition, resulting in only nominal size-adjusted differences in expenses. We find a wide disparity among fund expense ratios and their corresponding...

We investigate the relation between the performance and characteristics of 1,779 domestic, actively managed retail equity mutual funds with diverse expense ratios. We show that using expense ratio standard deviation classes is an effective method for characterizing fund expenses for investors....

We investigate the performance and attributes of 136 retail mutual funds tracking the Samp;P 500 Index across diverse expense ratio classes. Our performance measures are the Sharpe ratio, Jensen's alpha, and annualized total returns. Attributes analyzed for their relation to expense ratios...

Given their simplicity and presumed commodity-like nature, institutional Samp;P 500 Index mutual funds should be subject to active price competition, resulting in only nominal size-adjusted differences in expenses. We find a wide disparity among fund expense ratios and their corresponding...