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...

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...

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...

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...

Over the past decade, European investment funds have substantially increased their investment in dollar-denominated assets to more than 3.8 USD trillion, which should give raise to substantial currency hedging if US investor have reciprical currency exposures in their international portfolios....

Unsystemic risks in financial markets may be reduced through diversification. Systemic risks relate to the overall economy, cannot be influenced by a single company, and require special attention. Empirical research on return distributions in the long-term shows that investing under the...

We show that institutions invest in stocks within an industry that maintain exposure to their underlying industry risk factor. These "pure play" stocks have greater numbers of institutional investors and institutions systematically overweight them in their portfolios while underweighting low...

This paper reports the results of a survey of nine Dutch (AUM EUR 342 billion) and five Canadian (AUM CAD 203 billion) pension funds and fiduciary managers on the investment and management decisions regarding illiquid assets. The Dutch pension funds in our sample invest 15% of their portfolio in...

We develop a dynamic general-equilibrium framework with multiple households and multiple risky assets to explain how less- and more-sophisticated households differ in their portfolio and wealth dynamics. Differences in sophistication are modeled via heterogeneous confidence about asset returns,...

Valuation-based market timing demonstrates strong potential to improve risk-adjusted returns for conservative long-term investors. Such timing strategies based on the cyclically-adjusted price-earnings ratio provide comparable returns as a 100 percent stocks buy-and-hold strategy but with...