We present an experiment that investigates the effect of the fee structure and past returns on mutual fund choice. We find that subjects pay too little attention to the (periodic and small) operation expenses fee, but the more salient front-end load is used as a commitment device and leads to...

We posit a fund manager and an individual investor who maximize the expected (log) utility of their respective terminal wealth. The manager possesses more information than the investor does and charges the latter, her would-be customer, a linear compensation fee. The investor will delegate his...

We document that fund managers are more likely to allocate assets to firms managed by executives and directors with whom they share a similar political partisan affiliation. We find that this bias is not associated with improved fund performance. Funds with more partisan bias suffer from higher...

Recent evidence indicates that market model alphas are stronger predictors of mutual fund flows than alphas with other models. Berk and van Binsbergen (2016) claim that this evidence indicates CAPM is the best asset pricing model but Barber, Huang and Odean (2016) (BHO) claim it is evidence...

The aims of this paper are to detect evidence of institutional investor herding behaviour and examine the role that investor sentiment plays in the institutional investor herd behaviour. We use bivariate GARCH method estimated time varying beta to estimate herding variables of UK open-ended and...

We exploit the domestic portfolios of US mutual funds to provide microeconomic evidence that investors are more likely to liquidate geographically remote investments at times of high aggregate market volatility. This has important implications for asset prices. The valuations of stocks with ex...

A widespread concern in the investment industry is whether commonly used investment management fee arrangements encourage investment managers to act in their clients' interests. The value to managers of a one-period call performance fee is maximized by maximizing performance volatility. This is...

In this study, I compare the fund selection criteria used by investors in retail mutual funds with the criteria of investors in institutional mutual funds. I show several differences in investment flow patterns between retail and institutional funds, which are consistent with differences in...

We interview Australian fund executives about how their organisations responded to MySuper, a regulatory framework for default retirement savings funds that providers were required to have in place by the beginning of 2014. We provide an account of the influences on MySuper product design. Our...

Some mutual funds purchase stocks before dividend payments to artificially increase their dividends, which we call "juicing." Funds paid more than twice the dividends implied by their holdings in 7.4% of fund-years examined. Juicing is associated with larger inflows, and is more common among...