This paper proposes several new holdings-based measures of fund investment horizon, and examines the relation between manager skills and fund holding horizon. We find that both aggregate holdings and trades of long-horizon funds are informative about superior future long-term stock returns,...

This paper develops a simple technique that controls for ldquo;false discoveries,rdquo; or mutual funds that exhibit significant alphas by luck alone. Our approach precisely separates funds into (1) unskilled, (2) zero-alpha, and (3) skilled funds, even with dependencies in cross-fund estimated...

This paper develops a simple technique that controls for "false discoveries", or mutual funds that exhibit significant alphas by luck alone. Our approach precisely separates funds into (1) unskilled, (2) zero-alpha, and (3) skilled funds, even with dependencies in cross-fund estimated alphas. We...

Over the past 30 years, mutual funds have become the dominant vehicle through which individual investors prepare for retirement via defined contribution plans. Further, money market mutual funds, which hold $2.7 trillion as of September 2013, are now a major part of the cash economy in the U.S....

This paper implements strategies that use macroeconomic variables to select European equity mutual funds, including Pan-European, country, and sector funds. We find that several macro-variables are useful in locating funds with future outperformance, and that countryspecific mutual funds provide...

We examine whether professional money managers overreact to large climatic disasters. We find that managers within a major disaster region underweight disaster zone stocks to a much greater degree than distant managers and that this aversion to disaster zone stocks is related to a salience bias...

We analyze the flow of money between mutual fund categories, finding strong evidence of seasonality in investor risk aversion. Aggregate investor flow data reveal investor preference for safe mutual funds in autumn and risky funds in spring. During September alone, outflows from equity funds...

The past few decades have seen a major shift from centralized to decentralized investment management by pension fund sponsors, despite the increased coordination problems that this brings. Using a unique, proprietary dataset of pension sponsors and managers, we identify two secular...

This paper proposes a new holding horizon (HH) measure of active management and examines the relation between horizon and manager skill. Our HH measure identifies, in the cross-section, funds with higher future long-term alphas, while reported turnover identifies, in the time-series, when a...

We apply a new bootstrap statistical technique to examine the performance of the U.S. open-end, domestic-equity mutual fund industry over the 1975 to 2002 period. This bootstrap approach is necessary because the cross-section of mutual fund alphas has a complex, non-normal distribution - due to...