We investigate the performance of a sample of German mutual equity funds over the period from 1994 to 2003. Our general finding is that mutual funds, on average, hardly produce excess returns relative to their benchmark that are large enough to cover their expenses. This conclusion is drawn from...

One of the most crucial decisions for investors and plan sponsors is the selection of funds among the thousands of available alternatives. We stress that an investor first needs to specify a target alpha, i.e., the expected fund return in excess of a benchmark, and that the target alpha...

A great deal of research effort has sought to understand whether fund managers have skill. However, most of this research draws inferences from fund returns attributable to funds that may have been managed by many different managers over the years. In this paper we focus on the fund manager. We...