The article presents an overview of the assumptions and unintended consequences of the widespread adoption of modern portfolio theory (MPT) in the context of the growth of large institutional investors. We examine the many so-called risk management practices and financial products that have been...

The literature suggests that while decentralized decision-making can allow for greater specialization in an organization, it heightens the cost of coordinating decisions. The mutual fund industry – in particular, sole- and team-managed balanced funds – provides an ideal setting to test the...

Many important economic and political decisions are made by teams. In the economic literature, however, the decision units are frequently modeled as individual economic agents. The paper experimentally investigates the question to what extent observed team decisions under risk are actually...

This paper uses Duffie and Singleton (1999) discount model for defaultable bonds to infer the presence of a preferential credit treatment (PCT) for Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) in loss given default (LGD) space. The main inferences from the paper are twofold. -1- Lower lending fees in...

We examine the allocation of a limited pool of matching funds to public good projects using Quadratic Funding. In particular, we consider a variation of the Capital Constrained Quadratic Funding (CQF) mechanism proposed by Buterin, Hitzig and Weyl (2019) where only funds in the matching pool are...

This paper experimentally studies the disposition effects of teams and individuals. The disposition effect describes the phenomenon that investors are reluctant to realize losses, whereas winners are sold too early. Our experiments compare the investments of two-person teams to a setting where...

Using U.S. equity mutual fund data, we show that portfolio pumping – an illegal trading activity that artificially inflates year-end and quarter-end portfolio returns – is more pronounced among single-managed than team-managed funds. The return inflation by team-managed funds is 45% lower...

Despite the overwhelming trend in mutual funds towards team management, empirical studies find no performance benefits for this phenomenon. We show it is caused by large discrepancies in reported managerial structures in CRSP and Morningstar Principia datasets versus SEC records, resulting in up...

Investment clubs offer the opportunity to form a well-diversified portfolio with private investors being invested in that portfolio. Nevertheless, many investment clubs hold undiversified portfolios. We hypothesize that the clubs' composition and the characteristics of the decision making...

This paper experimentally studies the disposition effects of teams and individuals. The disposition effect describes the phenomenon that investors are reluctant to realize losses, whereas winners are sold too early. Our experiments compare the investments of two-person teams to a setting where...