Given the rapid growth of investment products focused on socially responsible investing (SRI), in March 2016 Morningstar began reporting standardized metrics to “grade” the Sustainability (i.e., SRI) level of thousands of mutual funds. While traditional financial theory suggests funds that...

We examine common asset allocation strategies for retirement investing, considering both static and dynamic approaches, as well as those allocation policies used by leading target date fund providers. We find that, over time, certain static approaches are essentially equivalent to dynamic...

We make use of a unique dataset of SEC Form N-SAR filings to examine the gross flows of U.S. bond funds. We find that gross inflows and outflows average around 4% of TNA per month, but net flows average only 0.26%. When modeling these flows, we see that, like equity funds, bond fund investors...

We study the universe of absolute return mutual funds and find no evidence they deliver positive alpha. Additionally, these funds can have significant factor exposures. Compared to ordinary equity funds, absolute return funds have much higher fees and turnover. They perform worse than their...

The top 5 percent of actively managed U.S. equity mutual funds in 2012 had greater aggregate TNA than the remaining 95 percent of funds combined. This skewness in size has implications for mutual fund research: What is true of the average fund is not necessarily true of the average dollar. We...