In order to shed light on the "black box" of institutional equity investing in a systematic manner, I conducted a broadly based questionnaire which received a large response from German mutual fund companies. The survey asked fund managers for their basic views and practices and for insights...

Recent research reveals that hedge fund returns exhibit a range of different,possibly non-linear pay-off patterns. It is difficult to qualify all these patternssimultaneously as being rational in a traditional framework for optimal financial decisionmaking. In this paper we present a simple...

A fund's performance is usually compared to the performance of an index or other funds. If a fund trails the benchmark, the fund manager is often replaced. We argue that this may lead to excessive risk-taking if fund managers differ in ability and have the opportunity to take excessive risk. To...

The aim of this study is the analysis of so called socially responsible investments (SRI). First, the performance of SRI equity investment funds and equity indices is investigated using Jensen´s alpha as performance measure. The analysis considers market timing strategies of the fund management...

Many college and university 403(b) plans restrict the menu of investment choices to funds offered by TIAA-CREF, the current manager of over half of all 403(b) contributions. Further, in the face of Internal Revenue Code changes that will take effect in 2006 and will make 403(b) plan ERISA...

This paper studies the relation between fund performance and the fund manager's investment strategy, which is based on the characteristics of the portfolio. The results show that neither momentum characteristics nor the valuation of stocks can explain differences in fund performance. However,...

This paper examines how investor and capital flows into mutual funds in the Swedish pension system are related to fund characteristics. Similarly to U.S. studies, we show that individuals chase past returns and have a strong preference for lower-fee funds. However, our results suggest that past...

The study investigates the mutual funds investment style in the Jordanian context. It uses monthly returns of five mutual funds from July 2000 to December 2009. To do so, it employs the 4-factors model with explanatory variables the market portfolio return, a small minus large capitalization...

Die strategische Asset Allokation ist die für den langfristigen Anlageerfolg wichtigste Entscheidung eines Kapitalanlegers. Eine fundierte Entscheidung erfordert einen mehrstufigen, strukturierten Prozess. Der Anleger muss sich mit den realistischen Chancen des Kapitalmarktes und mit seinen...

This paper discusses how to introduce liquidity into the well known mean-variance framework of portfolio selection using a representative sample of Spanish equity portfolios. Either by estimating mean-variance liquidity constrained frontiers or directly estimating optimal portfolios for...