Target-Date Funds (TDFs) are popular retirement investment vehicles that follow a predetermined schedule for rebalancing their mix of equity and fixed-income securities over time. We explore potential agency problems in TDFs by examining their return performance and their flow-performance...

This paper presents a new measure of active fund performance that evaluates funds in a manner which is aligned with what investors seek to optimize: utility. Unlike the information ratio, which is currently one of the most popular metrics of performance used by practitioners, my measure assumes...

Evidence is found of fully developed turbulence in the increments of U.S. bond fund flows. These flow increments are found to be both anisotropic and locally isotropic. The response function of the market participants generating the flow turbulence is linked to both renormalization and scale...

Pressure from institutional money managers to generate profits in the short run is often blamed for corporate myopia. Theoretical research suggests that money managers' short term focus stems from their career concerns and greater fund transparency can amplify these concerns. Using a...

This paper examines the relationship between mutual fund managers' past professional backgrounds and their portfolio performance, using Chinese mutual fund data from 2003 to 2016. We focus on managers with prior work experience either as industry analysts or as macro analysts, the two most...

Unlike mutual funds, unit investment trusts invest in a fixed portfolio of stocks for a predetermined period of time and hold limited cash positions. Thus, UITs provide an ideal sample to measure stock selection skill. We examine a sample of 1487 UITs over the period 2004 to 2013. We find that...

Mutual fund portfolio turnover ratios (PTR) are at the center of the short-termism debate, which criticizes corporate maneuvers taken to prop up near-term earnings at the expense of long-term, value focused investments and policies. Scholars and policymakers often rely on portfolio turnover...

This paper examines the predictive power of investment managers' sentiment revealed in their letters to shareholders for their future performance, using closed-end funds (CEFs) as a laboratory. We find that pessimistic tone in managers' letters to shareholders predicts superior future...

We show that fund-specific return skewness is associated with managerial skill and future hedge fund performance. Specifically, skewness in fund returns reflects managerial skill in avoiding large drawdowns. Using a new measure of investment skill that accounts for this managerial ability, we...

Using a regulation that increased portfolio disclosure frequency of US mutual funds as an exogenous shock shortening funds’ investment horizon, we find that affected funds influence portfolio firms to reduce the pay duration of their executives to incentivize them to also have shorter...