This paper examines the effect of incentive fees on the behavior of mutual fund managers. Funds with incentive fees exhibit positive stock selection ability, but a beta less than one results in funds not earning positive fees. From an investor's perspective, positive alphas plus lower expense...

S&P 500 index funds represent one of the simplest vehicles for examining rational behavior. They hold virtually the same securities, yet their returns differ by more than 2 percent per year. Although the relative returns of alternative S&P 500 funds are easily predictable, the relationship...

"To implement mean variance analysis one needs a technique for forecasting correlation coefficients. In this article we investigate the ability of several techniques to forecast correlation coefficients between securities. We find that separately forecasting the average level of pair-wise...

Almost all of the literature in finance analyzing the selection of optimum portfolios assumes that the agent making the decision has a full set of estimates of the expected return for each security and the variance covariance matrix between securities. In actual practice most decision makers...