In contrast with theoretical predictions, high-fee active equity funds generate worse net-of-expenses performance. We show that this fee-performance puzzle is driven by the preference of high-fee funds for stocks with low operating profitability and high investment rates, characteristics...

Industries are economically linked through customer-supplier trade flows. We show that industry shocks propagating along this inter-sectoral trade network can feed back to the originating industry, causing an "echo" -- intermediate-term autocorrelation in returns. Adopting techniques from graph...

Ostensibly passive index funds and ETFs are surprisingly active. A third of these funds exhibit more activeness than the median actively managed fund, as measured by conventional proxies. Using hand-collected prospectus data, we find that "passive" funds offer an increasingly wide assortment of...