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 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...

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 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...

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...

During the past few decades, the fraction of the equity market owned directly by individuals declined significantly. The same period witnessed investment trends that include the growth of indexing as well as shifts by active managers toward lower fees and more index-like investing. I develop an...

We model fund turnover in the presence of time-varying profit opportunities. Our model predicts a positive relation between an active fund's turnover and its subsequent benchmark-adjusted return. We find such a relation for equity mutual funds. This time-series relation between turnover and...

During the past few decades, the fraction of the equity market owned directly by individuals declined significantly. The same period witnessed investment trends that include the growth of indexing as well as shifts by active managers toward lower fees and more index-like investing. I develop an...

We empirically analyze the nature of returns to scale in active mutual fund management. We find strong evidence of decreasing returns at the industry level: As the size of the active mutual fund industry increases, a fund's ability to outperform passive benchmarks declines. At the fund level,...