Fund companies regularly send shareholder letters to their investors. We use textual analysis to investigate whether these letters' writing style influences fund flows and whether it predicts performance and investment styles. Fund investors react to the tone and content of shareholder letters:...

This paper investigates the impact of work group diversity on performance. Analyzing a uniquely large sample of management teams from the U.S. mutual fund industry we find that the influence of diversity on performance depends on the dimension of diversity that is analyzed. Informational...

We show that mutual fund managers' trading experiences bias their future repurchasing decisions. Specifically, a fund is 17% more likely to repurchase a stock when it previously sold the stock for a gain rather than for a loss. Fund managers still prefer to repurchase stocks they sold for a gain...

This paper documents a high and increasing capital concentration in the bond fund industry over the past three decades. Large funds deliver better performance and receive larger inflows than small funds, which explains the concentration of bond funds. However, large funds take more risks by...

This paper shows that low-expense index funds draw investor attention to a fund family, and the investors' subsequent incomplete search within funds in the family raises flows of actively managed funds in the same family by 10%. These spillover effects are more salient among retail investors and...

We document significantly lower inflows in female-managed funds than in male-managed funds. This result is obtained with field data and with data from a laboratory experiment. We find no gender differences in performance. Thus, rational statistical discrimination is unlikely to explain the fund...