To examine whether managers of micro-cap mutual funds add value, we compare the performance of micro-cap mutual funds against a micro-cap index. Micro-cap funds are mutual funds that invest in small firms with market value less than $300 million. Micro-cap mutual funds typically are actively...

Active fund managers are skilled and, on average, have used their skill to generate about $3.2 million per year. Large cross-sectional differences in skill persist for as long as ten years. Investors recognize this skill and reward it by investing more capital in funds managed by better...

In contrast with theoretical predictions, high-fee active equity funds generate worse net-of-expenses performance. We show that this fee-performance puzzle is driven by the preference of high-fee funds for stocks with low operating profitability and high investment rates, characteristics...

The majority of financial trades take place in open and highly regulated markets. As an alternative venue, large asset managers sometimes offset the trades of affiliated funds in an internal market, without relying on external facilities or supervision. In this paper, we employ institutional...

We propose a new approach for estimating mutual fund performance that simultaneously controls for both factor exposure and firm characteristics. This double-adjusted alpha is motivated by the recent findings that traditional Fama-French style factor models do not fully adjust returns for the...

One of the most crucial decisions for investors and plan sponsors is the selection of funds among the thousands of available alternatives. We stress that an investor first needs to specify a target alpha, i.e., the expected fund return in excess of a benchmark, and that the target alpha...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent mutual fund managers, as an important and representative group of professional investors, are prone to overconfidence and associated behavioural biases such as self-serving attribution. More importantly, we explore how these...

We investigate the performance of funds that specialise in cryptocurrency markets. In doing so, we contribute to a growing literature that aims to understand the role of digital assets as an investment. Methodologically, we implement a novel panel bootstrap approach that samples jointly the...

This study re-visits the question of benchmark mismatch among 1281 US equity mutual funds and its impact on benchmark-adjusted fund performance and ranking. All funds report S&P500 index as a prospectus benchmark, yet 2/3 of those are placed in the Morningstar category with risk and objectives...

We show that a simple and intuitive variable, the return of a bear spread portfolio orthogonalized with respect to the market (H-Bear factor), can serve as an important pillar for explaining the cross-section of hedge fund returns. Low H-Bear exposure funds (bear risk insurance sellers)...