It is not enough to say that particular mutual funds have very excessive and most excessive expense ratios. In addition, these high cost funds are associated with negative portfolio characteristics that include more risky and less diversified portfolios, higher trading costs and lower earnings....

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...

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...

Among the decisions most mutual fund portfolio managers make is the number of stocks to hold. We posit that there is an optimal number of stocks for each mutual fund, reflecting the trade-off between diversification benefits versus transactions and monitoring costs. We find a significant...

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....

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...