Using data for more than 800 college and university endowment funds over 2003-2011, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the spending policies used in practice as well as how frequently and why those mandates are revised over time. Given the long-term and relatively static nature of the...

This thesis consists of three essays on the interaction of investor clienteles and mutual fund behavior. The first essay (Cici, Kempf, and Sorhage 2015, Do Financial Advisors Provide Tangible Benefits for Investors? Evidence from Tax-Motivated Mutual Fund Flowsʺ) adds to the literature on fund...

Security analysts are often considered experts in the industries they follow. We analyze the impact of such expertise on market prices and returns in a setting where firms' earnings components may differ in their levels of persistence over time. In this context we show that a firm's...

We jointly model the information choice and portfolio allocation problem of institutional investors who are concerned about their performance relative to a benchmark. Benchmarking increases an investor's effective risk-aversion, which reduces his willingness to speculate and, consequently, his...

We use institutional trading data to examine whether skilled institutions exploit positive abnormal ex-dividend returns. Results show that institutions concentrate trading around certain ex-dates, and earn higher profits around these events. Dividend capture trades represent 6% of all...