We show that fund families allocate their fund managers to different market segments such that their skill is rewarded best. Whether a fund manager's skill is rewarded by higher alpha depends on the efficiency of the market segment in which she works. Even skilled managers can generate alpha...

This paper provides implied measures of higher-order dependencies between assets. The measures exploit only forward-looking information from the options market and can be used to construct an implied estimator of the covariance, co-skewness, and co-kurtosis matrices of asset returns. We...

The performance of actively managed mutual funds is largely dependent upon the investment decisions of the responsible fund managers. However, little is known about the behavior of these managers. This survey study sheds light on the decision processes of German fund managers. The design of the...

This experimental study investigates the impact of affective attitudes on risk and return estimates of stocks. Participants rate well-known blue-chip firms on an affective scale and forecast risk and return of the firms' stock. We find that positive affective attitudes lead to a prediction of...

We examine the influence on managerial risk taking of incentives due to employment risk and due to compensation. Our empirical investigation of the risk taking behavior of mutual fund managers indicates that managerial risk taking crucially depends on the relative importance of these incentives....

Expected returns can hardly be estimated from time series data. Therefore, many recent papers suggest investing in the global minimum variance portfolio. The weights of this portfolio depend only on the return variances and covariances, but not on the expected returns. The weights of the global...

More and more investors apply socially responsible screens when building their stock portfolios. This raises the question whether these investors can increase their performance by incorporating such screens into their investment process. To answer this question we implement a simple trading...

We test the frequently made claim that SRI funds are conventional funds in disguise. For this purpose, we compare the portfolio holdings of SRI funds to conventional funds concerning their social and environmental standards. Our empirical study of US equity funds shows that SRI funds have a...