According to the often-cited CapCo study (2003) about hedge fund failures, 50% of the failures were driven by Operational Risk. Not only for hedge funds, but also for other asset management companies – such as private equity companies, family offices or independent asset managers - operational...

We use price pressure resulting from purchases by mutual funds with large capital inflows to identify overvalued equity. This is a relatively exogenous overvaluation indicator as it is associated with who is buying, buyers with excess liquidity, rather than what is being purchased. We document...

We study outsourcing relationships among international asset management firms. We find that in companies that manage both outsourced and inhouse funds, inhouse funds outperform outsourced funds by 0.85% annually (57% of the expense ratio). We attribute this result to preferential treatment of...

Over the years, Institute research has shown active managers, even the best-performing ones, suffered periods of weak returns relative to benchmarks and their peers. But underperformance, up to three years, had relatively little impact on the best-performing funds' ability to deliver success...

We study whether firms increase share repurchases when their shareholders have short-term preferences. We base our analysis on economic theory that establishes that greater transparency about an agent's action increases the agent's career concerns and short-termism. We use a...

The same fund family may sponsor both passive and active funds. Due to the funds' different fee structures and flow sensitivity to performance, this may create conflicts of interest at the fund family level. Using portfolio firms' mergers and acquisitions as a laboratory, I show that fund...

We document evidence that mutual funds, on average, are averse to investing in tax-avoiding firms, which seems anomalous given the potential for two likely motives. Mutual fund managers' compensation incentives may lead them to prefer tax-avoiding firms, or the fact that mutual funds are...

We document evidence that mutual funds, on average, are averse to investing in tax-avoiding firms, which seems anomalous given mutual fund managers' incentive structure. Our results remain unchanged when we address endogeneity concerns using several methods, including identification through...

We investigate the structure of mutual funds' corporate governance preferences as revealed by how they vote their shares in portfolio companies. We apply standard unsupervised learning tools from the machine learning literature to analyze a comprehensive dataset of mutual funds' votes and find...

We analyze whether the growing importance of passive investors has influenced the campaigns, tactics, and successes of activists. We find activists are more likely to seek board representation when a larger share of the target company's stock is held by passively managed mutual funds....