We propose and test a methodological framework to examine the relation between mutual fund fees and return predictability. Gil-Bazo and Ruiz-Verdu (2009) drew attention to the puzzling fact that funds with worse before-fee performance charge higher fees. We make another contribution to the...

This study introduces an innovative approach to measuring the “style-shifting activity” (SSA) of mutual funds using daily returns. Applying our new measure to a comprehensive sample of 2631 active US equity mutual funds, we show (i) that SSA predicts future performance, especially for...

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...

Three concepts: stochastic discount factors, multi-beta pricing and mean-variance efficiency, are at the core of modern empirical asset pricing. This chapter reviews these paradigms and the relations among them, concentrating on conditional asset-pricing models where lagged variables serve as...

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...

We use a holdings-based attribution model to disaggregate the benchmark-adjusted returns to U.S. equity mutual funds into components that reflect persistent segment tilts, the timing of segment returns, and stock selection relative to their benchmarks. We find that large-cap funds add value by...

Final working paper version. "" Published version: The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 31, Issue 7, July 2018, pp. 2499–2552. Past fund performance does a poor job of predicting future outcomes. The reason is noise. Using a random effects framework, we reduce the noise by pooling...

We study how 9 different market participants trade with respect to 130 different stock return anomalies and how each participant's trades predict returns. Retail investors trade against anomalies, while firms' and short sellers' trades agree with anomalies. Institutional portfolios are weighted...

Using a novel equity lending dataset, this paper is the first to show that expected returns strongly and negatively predict future equity lending fees. In comparing two expected return measures, I find that a rational expected return has stronger predictive power of future short selling activity...