We use a new data set to study the determinants of the performance of open-end actively managed equity mutual funds in 27 countries. We find that mutual funds underperform the market overall. The results show important differences in the determinants of fund performance in the U.S. and elsewhere...

We propose forecasting separately the three components of stock market returns: the dividend-price ratio, earnings growth, and price-earnings ratio growth - the sum-of-the-parts (SOP) method. Our method exploits the different time-series persistence of the components and obtains out-of-sample...