A fund's performance is usually compared to the performance of an index or other funds. If a fund trails the benchmark, the fund manager is often replaced. We argue that this may lead to excessive risk-taking if fund managers differ in ability and have the opportunity to take excessive risk. To...

The mutual funds' returns, inter alia, are dependent on fund managers' performance. This makes human capital efficiency very central for consistent risk-adjusted performance. The persistence in performance becomes more critical during periods of high turbulence, like the one we are experiencing...

It is recognized in the literature that there is a negative relationship between fund performance and fund exit. This paper analyses the performance of 6,600 U.S. mutual funds that exited the market in the 2000 – 2014 period and nearly twice as many U.S. mutual funds that remained operational,...

We present a comprehensive analysis of the performance and flows of U.S. actively-managed equity mutual funds during the COVID-19 crisis of 2020. We find that most active funds underperform passive benchmarks during the crisis, contradicting a popular hypothesis. Funds with high sustainability...

I study the determinants of mutual fund managers' expectations about the stock market and its implications for decision making and fund performance. Using a direct measure of managers' market expectations extracted from mutual funds' semi-annual reports, I find that fund managers extrapolate...

This paper provides a first step in developing a system-wide stress simulation. The model incorporates several important features of the financial system. These include several types of institution (including banks and non-banks) and how their actions may propagate and amplify stress. Rather...

We systematically study the value of the information contained in closed-end fund (CEF) premiums. We parametrically estimate CEF expected returns as a function of the history of CEF premiums, in addition to the current premium, and buy the quintile of funds with the highest expected returns and...

We explore the trading decisions of equity mutual funds during ten periods of extreme market uncertainty. We find that mutual funds reduced their aggregate holdings of illiquid stocks. Exploring the drivers behind this result reveals that this is mainly driven by larger withdrawals from funds...