Passive investing, particularly in emerging markets, has become an increasingly popular means of quick, “diversified” exposure to a particular segment of the markets. Defensive investors, as Benjamin Graham noted, would be best served owning a diversified list of leading companies. Yet it's...

The literature proposes two competing explanations — the “smart-money” and “persistent-flow” hypotheses — for the positive relation between mutual fund flow and future fund performance. We examine the flow-performance relation for different classes of U.S. domestic equity mutual...

Passive investing, particularly in emerging markets, has become an increasingly popular means of quick, “diversified” exposure to a particular segment of the markets. Flows into passive emerging market products have been so strong that assets in exchange-traded funds (ETFs) designed to...

ETFs attract a larger proportion of institutional investors than do the underlying markets. The price of an ETF will deviate from the price of the underlying, if institutional investors are less prone to investor sentiment-driven mispricing, than are retail investors. We employ a unique...

I study the market for lending and borrowing securities in the United States. I find that by making securities available for borrowing, mutual funds acquire information about short selling, which they exploit for trading. Funds with discretion in their investment choices rebalance their...

This article examines the risk and return characteristics of U.S. mutual funds. We employ an equilibrium version of the Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) and a principal-components-based statistical technique to identify performance benchmarks. We also consider the Capital Asset Pricing Model...

This paper uses proprietary data on self-reported employee reviews from Glassdoor.com to study the relationship between employee satisfaction and mutual funds’ performance. Using the staggered adoption of Anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) laws in the U.S. and...

Recent literature indicates that a liquidity investment style – the process of investing in relatively less liquid stocks within the liquid universe of publicly traded stocks – has led to excess returns relative to size and value. While previously documented at the security level, we examine...

An idealized model of the investment process redefines the respective roles of security analysts and portfolio managers, quantifies such concepts as activity and aggressiveness, and explains how the individual analyst's efforts at forecasting returns translate into improved portfolio performance

We pursue the first large scale investigation of a strongly growing mutual fund type: Islamic funds. Based on an unexplored, survivorship bias adjusted dataset, we analyse the financial performance and investment style of 265 Islamic equity funds from twenty countries. As Islamic funds often...