This Article offers a broad theory of what distinguishes investment funds from ordinary companies, with ramifications for how these funds are understood and regulated. The central claim is that investment funds (i.e., mutual funds, hedge funds, private equity funds and their cousins) are...

Traditional risk-adjusted performance measures, such as the Sharpe ratio, the Treynor index or Jensen’s alpha, based on the mean-variance framework, are widely used to rank mutual funds. However, performance measures that consider risk by taking into account only losses, such as Value-at-Risk...

We argue that active management's popularity is not puzzling despite the industry's poor track record. Our explanation features decreasing returns to scale: As the industry's size increases, every manager's ability to outperform passive benchmarks declines. The poor track record occurred before...

This paper studies the effect of new fund flows on investment behavior and the resulting equilibrium price of risk. The Small Fund Industry model shows equilibria with overinvestment in unprofitable and underinvestment in profitable investment opportunities. The Large Fund Industry model derives...

Hedge funds feature special compensation structure compared to traditional investments. Previous studies mainly focus on the provisions and incentive structure of hedge fund contract, such as 2/2'8 hurdle rates, and high-water mark. We develop an algorithm to empirically estimate the monthly...

To explore the rationality and competitiveness of the mutual fund industry, we analyze the alpha of active and index mutual funds from a global sample of more than 60,000 equity and fixed income funds and test the null hypothesis that alphas to investors are zero. We distinguish between...

Exchange traded funds (ETFs) have grown substantially in diversity and size in recent years, reflecting a broader shift towards passive, index investing. As a consequence, there is increased interest by practitioners in the pricing and liquidity of ETFs. This paper develops and estimates a model...

We study the interdependencies between transaction costs, portfolio characteristics, and mutual fund performance. Using a novel dataset of actual mutual fund trades, we find that, controlling for investment style, larger funds realize lower percentage transaction costs than smaller funds. Larger...

Fund flows become less sensitive to high performance after 2000, thereby decreasing convexity of the flow-performance relationship. I present novel evidence on the effects of aggregate performance on convexity of the flow-performance relationship. Flows to high-performing funds decrease when the...

Our study examines mutual fund demand for a newly designed security, exchange-traded notes (ETNs). We find strong evidence that mutual fund long positions in ETNs significantly underperform and that the motivations to hold ETNs lie outside of maximizing returns. Mutual funds hold ETNs to hedge...