Purpose This paper empirically investigates the performance of Islamic funds, which have been praised for weathering the 2008 financial storm relatively well and compares it to a European product designed to protect the most vulnerable of investors, UCITS funds. Design/methodology/approach This...

Traditional portfolio theory predicts that investors' portfolios should be diversified across international markets. In contrast, empirical studies document that investors are more likely to invest in their home country and in foreign markets that are culturally similar to and geographically...

This study investigates whether the relation between macro-level fund flow and market returns varies between the retail and institutional fund management markets. We find evidence of a contemporaneous relation between flow and market return for retail funds and also find evidence to support the...

I show that investors misallocate a substantial amount of capital in the active mutual fund industry. To this end, I develop a novel structural identification strategy to estimate the returns to scale in active management and the time-varying fund skills. A median fund is over-allocated by $29...

Using a novel database, we show that the stock-price impact of analyst trade ideas is at least as large as the impact of stock recommendation, target price, and earnings forecast changes, and that investors following trade ideas can earn significant abnormal returns. Trade ideas triggered by...

A low-interest rate environment induces higher demand for income-generating assets, such as high-dividend stocks and high-coupon bonds. In this paper, we explore the impact of this “reaching-for-income” phenomenon on fund flows of corporate bond mutual funds. We find that high...

The 27th SUERF Colloquium in Munich in June 2008: New Trends in Asset Management: Exploring the Implications was already topical in the Summer of 2008. The subsequent dramatic events in the Autumn of 2008 made the presentations in Munich even more relevant to investors and bankers that want to...

This paper analyzes the approaches adopted by institutional investors to manage climate risk in their portfolios and proposes policies to increase climate awareness in this large segment of the capital markets. Because of their size and their role as conduit of savers' climate concerns to the...