We present a framework for deciding when to choose an alternative to passively investing in capitalization-weighted indices within any particular asset class. Five reasons are identified for seeking an alternative. Three of these reflect situations where a capitalization-weighted index is either...

A widespread concern in the investment industry is whether commonly used investment management fee arrangements encourage investment managers to act in their clients' interests. The value to managers of a one-period call performance fee is maximized by maximizing performance volatility. This is...

Active fee is the ratio between the excess cost of active management over the index alternative and the fund's activity level. We suggest a simple model that explains active capital allocations in the presence of time-varying active fee. We show that investors respond in accordance with the...

The paper builds on a simple yet novel idea that the way investors react to the recent mutual fund performance depends largely upon the long-term historical performance of that fund. In particular, I find that investors react more actively to the fund's recent performance in case of the funds...

Mutual fund families are increasingly assigning traders to manage corporate bond mutual funds. Using this setting to study the role of traders in investment management, we document that trader managers identify and exploit short-term trading opportunities at lower transaction costs. These skills...

Large-Scale Asset Purchases can impact the price of securities directly, when securities are targeted by the central bank, or indirectly through portfolio re-balancing of private investors. We quantify both the direct and the portfolio re-balancing impact, emphasizing the role of investor...

As institutional investors have become more aggressive in deploying their capital, fund managers have become more creative with their product offerings. In this paper, we consider a new institutional fund of mutual funds, a portfolio that combines the “best-idea” stocks from two underlying...

I present a dynamic investment model in which mutual funds' inferior performance is an equilibrium response to incentives rather than the consequence of low skills. In the model, a skilled (informed) manager responds to investors' flows, which are a convex function of performance relative to...

This paper demonstrates that the average investor would be better off by following a readily-implementable strategy of investing in a portfolio of the five largest active funds in U.S. equity, fixed income and international equity asset categories than investing in a corresponding portfolio of...

Mutual funds' exposure to corporate bonds has brought concerns about risks arising from liquidity transformation back to the fore. With a focus on fund asset liquidity and investors, this paper explores the flow-performance relationship and the liquidity management of funds in the presence of...