Objective – Even though the unit trust industry witnessed high growth in portfolios size, performances and regulations, however, there is still insufficient understanding of various aspects of the industry such as the lack of information on the funds' unit price behavior and their trend in the...

Using tax filings from 374,351 U.S. nonprofit organizations from 2008 to 2020, we provide the first large-scale analysis of endowment prevalence, function, asset allocation, and returns. Endowment use varies systematically across sectors and revenue models. Organizations with endowments scale...

Using hand-collected data on European auto asset-backed securities (Auto ABS), we examine the role of mutual funds in financing the transition to zero-emission mobility. Mutual funds, particularly those with a green mandate, tend to have a higher exposure to sustainability-transparent Auto ABS...

Kumar, Niessen-Ruenzi, and Spalt argue that U.S. investors irrationally discriminate against mutual fund managers with foreign-sounding names. They report that managers with foreign-sounding names attract less annual investor flows, experience less inflows following good performance and more...

Open-end mutual funds have grown to become a key player in the corporate bond market. They invest in illiquid bonds but provide liquid claims to shareholders. Does such liquidity transformation introduce fragility to the corporate bond market? To address this question, we create a novel measure...

Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) – tradeable investments that provide a return linked to an underlying index or basket of assets – are likely the most successful financial product since the 2008 crisis. Over the last decade they've experienced remarkable growth. Yet these products may also be...

I show that investors misallocate a substantial amount of capital in the active mutual fund industry. To this end, I develop a novel structural identification strategy to estimate the returns to scale in active management and the time-varying fund skills. A median fund is over-allocated by $29...

If capital won't come to fund managers, fund managers will go to capital. I document that fund managers move across mutual fund firms to manage amounts of capital that better match their skill, which improves the allocative efficiency of capital across fund managers. For causal identification, I...

Recent studies on agency problems in private equity fueled the suspicion that fund managers strategically manipulate performance estimates around fundraising times. While these studies use aggregated portfolio data, this paper offers the first analysis of "window dressing" in private equity...

Over time, new mutual fund volume varies across the states of the economy, and largely clusters in periods where the market is "hot". This phenomenon relates (i) to upcoming IPO-related investment opportunities, which correlate with the economic environment cross-sectionally, and (ii) to fund...