The goal of this study is to determine which fund or country-specific characteristics predict accurate performance in terms of tracking country-specific stock market indices. Ninety-three country-specific exchange-traded funds from 47 different countries are included in this study. In accordance...

This paper presents the results of an empirical study concerning conventional and socially responsible mutual funds.We apply a sophisticated operations research algorithm embedded in inverse portfolio optimization on financial market data, ESG-scores and CRSP fund data. Due to our results we...

In recent years, the investment fund industry has had a strong boost around the world, both in assets under management as in number of funds and participants. This growth in supply and demand could be described as spectacular despite several crises in the financial markets during the last two...

We examine whether professional money managers overreact to large climatic disasters. We find that managers within a major disaster region underweight disaster zone stocks to a much greater degree than distant managers and that this aversion to disaster zone stocks is related to a salience bias...

We hypothesize that poor country-level governance, which makes public information less reliable, induces fund managers to increase their use of semi-public information. Utilizing data from international mutual funds and stocks over the 2000-2009 period, we find that semi-public...

We hypothesize that poor country-level governance, which makes public information less reliable, induces fund managers to increase their use of semi-public information. Utilizing data from international mutual funds and stocks over the 2000-2009 period, we find that semi-public...

A closet indexer is more likely to meet a value-weighted investment benchmark by value-weighting the portfolio. Following this intuition, we introduce a simple measure of active management, the absolute difference between the value weights and the actual weights held by a fund, averaged across...

Recent academic research predicts that (i) equity mutual funds have a systematically better performance during periods of economic downturn and (ii) investors are willing to pay high fees for funds that provide recession insurance. In this paper, we test these hypotheses using international fund...

Samuelson (1967) argues that as a general matter it is easy to show that investors should be maximally diversified. For this reason many institutions are attracted to diversified portfolios of hedge funds, referred to as Funds of Hedge Funds (FOFs). In this paper we examine a new database that...