We study an economy with a CEO who trades off the incentive to divert funds, which leads to underinvestment, against the incentive to overinvest based on his optimism. In equilibrium, we see overinvestment relative to what the shareholder or a social planner would implement but underinvestment...

We posit a fund manager and an individual investor who maximize the expected (log) utility of their respective terminal wealth. The manager possesses more information than the investor does and charges the latter, her would-be customer, a linear compensation fee. The investor will delegate his...

We use a unique dataset of European performance-fee mutual funds to examine the interaction between explicit incentives (performance fees) and implicit incentives (fund flows) of asset managers. Funds with performance fees face substantially steeper implicit incentives compared to...

The volume weighted average price (VWAP) execution strategy is well known and widely used in practice. In this study, we explicitly introduce a trading volume process into the Almgren-Chriss model, which is a standard model for optimal execution. We then show that the VWAP strategy is the...

A hedge fund manager invests the fund in a constant investment opportunity, and receives high-water mark fees when the fund reaches a new maximum relative to a stochastic benchmark, aiming to maximize the expected power utility from fees in the long run. The manager's optimal portfolio includes...

We present a model with dynamic investment flows, where fund managers have the ability to generate excess returns and study how forcing them to commit part or all of their personal wealth to the fund they manage affects fund risk taking. We contrast the behavior of a manager that may invest her...

I consider the problem of portfolio optimization for a manager whose compensation is given by the sum of a constant and a variable term. The constant term is a fixed percentage of the managed funds that is payed to the manager independently of his performance. The variable term is a premium that...

Mutual fund managers' compensation packages often contain relative performance-dependent components such as year-end bonus. We examine the incentive effect of such compensation structure using a dynamic trading model with uncertain expected return and costly information. We show that relative...

The paper proposes a model of delegated portfolio management in which career concerns lead to unprofitable trade by uninformed managers (i.e. churning). We find that churning does not necessarily reduce the return that a representative investor expects ex-ante from delegating trade to a manager....

The investment fund sector has expanded dramatically since the crisis of 2008-2009. As the sector grows, so do the implications of its risk-taking for the wider financial system and real economy. This paper provides empirical evidence for the existence of widespread risk-taking incentives in the...