Since Target Date Funds (TDFs) became one of the default investment strategies for the 401(k) defined contribution (DC) beneficiaries, they have developed rapidly. Usually they are structured according to the principle “young people should invest more in equities”. Is this really a good...

The constant proportion portfolio insurance is a dynamic strategy of investment protecting a fund against a fall of its market value below a predetermined floor. In this work, we revisit the CPPI under the assumption that the risky asset is a stochastic process whose the average return and...

We develop an agent-based model of traditional banks and asset managers to investigate the contagion risk related to fire sales and balance sheet interactions. We take a structural approach to the price formation in fire sales as in Bluhm et al. (2014) and introduce a market clearing mechanism...

In this paper I investigate the investment behavior of SRI investors based on SRI mutual fund flows. Specifically, I analyze how SRI investors react to past performance and ethical standards. This empirical study shows that over the years along with the development of the SRI fund market, the...

Traditional risk-adjusted performance measures, such as the Sharpe ratio, the Treynor index or Jensen’s alpha, based on the mean-variance framework, are widely used to rank mutual funds. However, performance measures that consider risk by taking into account only losses, such as Value-at-Risk...

This paper investigates the purchases and redemptions of a large cross-sectional sample of German equity funds. We find that investors punish bad performance by selling their shares, but also have a tendency to sell winners. Investors in large fund families show higher sales and redemption...

This paper studies the flow-performance relationship of three different investor groups in mutual funds: Households, financial corporations, and insurance companies and pension funds, establishing the following findings: Financial corporations have a strong tendency to chase past performance and...

We argue that active management's popularity is not puzzling despite the industry's poor track record. Our explanation features decreasing returns to scale: As the industry's size increases, every manager's ability to outperform passive benchmarks declines. The poor track record occurred before...

This paper studies the flow-performance relationship of three different investor groups in mutual funds: Households, financial corporations, and insurance companies and pension funds, establishing the following findings: Financial corporations have a strong tendency to chase past performance and...

This paper introduces two measures to investigate potential window-dressing behavior among mutual fund managers. We show that unskilled managers that perform poorly are more likely to window dress by strategically purchasing winner stocks and selling loser stocks near quarter ends. Further,...