Fund managers are paid a fixed management fee in proportion to their assets under management. This means to maximize revenue, managers hoard assets. Whilst this results in increased revenue for the manager often, due to diseconomies of scale, it results in lower returns for the investor. Here we...

This is the first study of corporate-bond mutual fund performance that examines detailed security-level holdings and returns. The new database allows us to decompose the costs and benefits of active management. In contrast to prior research on equity funds that shows evidence of stock-selection...

This paper analyzes the economics of the private equity fund compensation. We build a novel model to estimate the expected revenue to fund managers as a function of their investor contracts. In particular, we evaluate the present value of the fair-value test (FVT) carried interest scheme, which...

The starting point in this research in the analysis of dynamic and structure of assets of investment funds in particular types of funds (assets, hybrids, money market funds, stable growth funds). Analyzing time series of assets of funds the tendency of growth can be noticed. The tendency is...

Using novel data on investors' bond portfolios, we study the contagion of the crisis from securitized bonds to corporate bonds. When securitized bonds became “toxic” in August 2007, mutual funds retained the now illiquid securitized bonds and sold corporate bonds. Funds with negative flows...

Using a novel data set of institutional investors' bond holdings, we study a transmission mechanism that explains the contagion of the financial crisis of 2007-2008 from the securitized bond market to the corporate bond market. We argue that the crisis shock was propagated by the behavior of...

Long-short and market neutral funds seek superior risk-adjusted returns while limiting their exposure to stock market risk. Over the 1999 to 2013 period the number of funds with these investment objectives increased by over 700 percent. Despite their growing popularity, we find that long-short...

This paper investigates how cyclical variables drive net aggregate fund flows towards emerging markets (EMs). Through the aggregation of net flows of all open-end dedicated funds, the analysis finds that flows in equity and fixed income are driven by recent past performance in both developed and...