We find evidence that conflicts of interest are pervasive in the asset management business owned by investment banks. Using data from 1990 to 2008, we compare the alphas of mutual funds, hedge funds and institutional funds operated by investment banks and non-bank conglomerates. We find that...

To study the welfare effects of investment barriers and the opening of markets to foreigners, we construct an equilibrium model of international asset pricing without agency costs that allows endogenous market participation among heterogeneous agents. Equilibrium prices and the set of...

Most mutual fund managers have performance-based contracts that are incomplete. We study risk-shifting implications emanating from these contracts. Our theory predicts that mutual fund managers with asymmetric contracts and mid-year performance close to their announced benchmark increase their...

Performance of investment products managed by firms in which PhDs play a key role is superior to the performance of products managed by otherwise similar firms. This relation is not a result of endogenous matching between firms and PhDs. Performance is related to training (the field of study)...

We identify strong and robust evidence of strategic performance allocation in the institutional money management industry, directed toward strong recent performers. The extent of strategic performance allocation varies with the product's client power. Strategic performance allocation is...

Liquidity plays an important role in global research. We identify high quality liquidity proxies based on low-frequency (daily) data, which provide 1,000X to 10,000X computational savings compared to computing high-frequency (intraday) liquidity measures. We find that: (1) Closing Percent Quoted...

Using a database of daily institutional trades, we document that a majority of short-term institutional trades lose money. In aggregate, over 23% of round-trip trades are held for less than three months, and the returns on these trades average -3.91% (non-annualized). These losses are pervasive...

Liquidity plays an increasingly important role in empirical asset pricing, market efficiency, and corporate finance. Identifying high quality proxies for liquidity based on daily data only (not intraday data) would permit liquidity to be studied over relatively long timeframes and across many...

How do different databases define a firm? What are the rules for listing/de-listing firms across different databases? In this paper we show that the divergence in the criteria for listing/de-listing firms between the CRSP and TAQ databases is significant enough to impact the magnitude and...