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...

This paper studies the effect of new fund flows on investment behavior and the resulting equilibrium price of risk. The Small Fund Industry model shows equilibria with overinvestment in unprofitable and underinvestment in profitable investment opportunities. The Large Fund Industry model derives...

An emerging literature has shown that investors are sensitive to mutual fund names. Using a sample of US equity funds over the period 1993-2017, we provide evidence that funds with a name closer to the family's name attract more flows and display a stronger performance-flow relationship. We also...

In this paper, we examine and compare the form of the flow-performance relationship for U.S. retail and institutional mutual funds. We provide evidence that the convex form of the flow-performance function documented by previous research characterizes mostly the relationship in the upper region...

Purpose: I investigate the dynamics of mutual fund investment flows across the business cycle. To account for the differences in the flow patterns of funds catered for institutional investors and those focusing on retail investors, I conduct my investigation separately for flows of institutional...

We show that many stylized empirical patterns for mutual fund flows are driven by investor sentiment. Specifically, when sentiment is high, investors exhibit a stronger tendency of chasing past fund performance; fund flows are less sensitive to fund expenses; and investors are attracted more to...

This paper is a response to the Russian ETF anomaly that demonstrates how costly for individual investors might be the absence of ETFs on domestic markets. Their absence and, therefore, the lack of investors' familiarity with these products might be one of the several reasons why Russian...

Return-chasing investors almost exclusively consider top-performing funds for their investment decisions. When drawing conclusions about the managerial skill of these top performers, they tend to neglect fund volatility and the cross-sectional information contained in the number of funds and the...

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...