This is a survey article. In it we review the modern literature on the characteristics and performance of mutual funds. Key articles on open end stock and bond funds, closed end funds and exchange traded funds are reviewed. Topics range from measuring and predicting performance to explaining...

Managers of Fund of Funds have access to information not available to the general public in evaluating funds from their own family. However, they may have family or self‐serving motives that can hurt shareholder performance. By examining a history of individual transactions of Funds of Funds,...

A number of papers have demonstrated that over historical periods, a specified set of factors have outperformed actively managed funds. However, in almost all cases, the factors employed or the procedures followed are not replicable by tradable passive investments. In addition, tradable passive...

In this paper we explore a new explanation of why closed-end bond funds exist when similar open-end funds are available. In general, closed-end funds operate in the less-liquid parts of the market. When we compare closed-end bond funds with a matched set of open-end funds with the same...