Mutual funds hold 32% of the U.S. equity market and comprise 58% of retirement savings, yet retail investors consistently make poor choices when selecting funds. Theory suggests that poor choices are partially due to mutual fund managers creating unnecessarily complex disclosures and fee...

The central role of the media for people's minds and for capital markets has been analyzed by a broad range of literature, nourished from several strands of academic research. Applying a vector autoregression on a unique set of TV news, consumer sentiment and excess flows of mutual funds, I find...

This study shows that the representative investor's sophistication in the market for mutual funds is time-varying, and increases with the constraints on household disposable income at the aggregate level. Based on the fact that energy commodities are largely inelastic household expenditures that...

This paper uses an administrative panel dataset to examine Swedish households' socially responsible investing (SRI) in mutual funds. We zoom in on the differences between all and wealthy households because of the wealthy households' importance for the economy. Surprisingly, wealthy households...

Active fee is the ratio between the excess cost of active management over the index alternative and the fund's activity level. We suggest a simple model that explains active capital allocations in the presence of time-varying active fee. We show that investors respond in accordance with the...

Each year, the Investment Company Institute (ICI) conducts a telephone survey of US households to track households’ ownership of mutual funds and to gather information on their demographic and financial characteristics. The most recent survey was conducted from May to June 2020 and was based...

Each year, the Investment Company Institute (ICI) conducts a telephone survey of US households to track households’ ownership of mutual funds and to gather information on their demographic and financial characteristics. The most recent survey was conducted from May to June 2020 and was based...

We study the tradeoff between direct and indirect stock investments through equity mutual funds for a utility-maximizing investor. Whereas direct investments impose higher transaction costs on the formation of a well-diversified portfolio, mutual funds charge fees for their services. Our results...