Mutual funds often disappear following poor performance. When this poor performance is partly attributable to negative idiosyncratic shocks, funds' estimated alphas understate their true alphas. This paper estimates a structural model to correct for this bias. Although most funds still have...

Book value of equity consists of two economically different components: retained earnings and contributed capital. We predict that book-to-market strategies work because the retained earnings component of the book value of equity includes the accumulation and, hence, the averaging of past...

Using data on $18 trillion of assets under management, we show that actively managed institutional accounts outperformed strategy benchmarks by 88 (44) basis points on a gross (net) basis during the period 2000–2012. Estimates from a Sharpe (1992) model imply that asset managers'...

Stocks tend to earn high or low returns relative to other stocks every year in the same month (Heston and Sadka 2008). We show these seasonalities are balanced out by seasonal reversals: a stock that has a high expected return relative to other stocks in one month has a low expected return...

Stocks earn significantly negative abnormal returns before earnings announcements and positive after them. This "earnings announcement return cycle" (EARC) is unrelated to the earnings announcement premium, and it is a feature of stocks widely covered by analysts. Analysts' forecasts follow the...

Using a dataset of $17 trillion of assets under management, we document that actively-managed institutional accounts outperformed strategy benchmarks by 86 (42) basis points gross (net) during 2000–2012. In return, asset managers collected $162 billion in fees per year for managing 29% of...