Open-end mutual funds usually rely on the closing prices of the assets they hold to compute their net asset value (NAV), a price at which funds stand ready to buy and sell their own shares. Since the underlying assets' closing prices might be hours or even days old, the fund's NAV can be stale....

This study provides empirical evidence on the role of disclosure in resolving agency conflicts in delegated investment management. For certain expenditures fund managers have alternative means of payment which differ greatly in their opacity: payments can be expensed (relatively transparent); or...

Berk and Green (2004) argue that investment inflow at high-performing mutual funds eliminates return persistence because fund managers face diminishing returns to scale. Our study examines the role of trading costs as a source of diseconomies of scale for mutual funds. We estimate annual trading...

Under the typical institutional trading arrangement a portfolio manager makes the trade decision and a trading desk executes the trade, with execution performance evaluated against a benchmark such as the volume weighted average price (VWAP). We show that this trading arrangement provides...

We model an exchange as a collection of specialists, each a monopolist market maker in a subset of the stocks listed on the exchange. Specialists can obtain net private benefits at the expense of the exchange (the collection of all specialists) by quoting a privately optimal pricing schedule....

We directly estimate annual trading costs for a sample of equity mutual funds and find that these costs are large and exhibit substantial cross sectional variation. Trading costs average 0.78% of fund assets per year and have an inter-quartile range of 0.59%. Trading costs, like expense ratios,...

We directly estimate annual trading costs for a sample of equity mutual funds and find that these costs are large and exhibit substantial cross sectional variation. Trading costs average 0.78% of fund assets per year and have an inter-quartile range of 0.59%. Trading costs, like expense ratios,...

Mutual funds price their shares using last-trade prices of their underlying assets. Because last-trade prices are often stale, this practice results in fund share prices (NAVs) whose daily changes are predictable. We show that the predictability is pervasive and economically significant in...

We study the relation between market returns and unexpected aggregate flow into U.S. equity funds, using semi-weekly and daily flow data. The reaction of flow and return --whether it be one reacting to the other, or both reacting to a third factor -- is fast and strong. The flow-return relation...

This study develops and tests a theoretical rationale for the well-documented fact that IPO prices are revised only partially in response to waiting-period market returns. Rational issuers maximize the expected surplus from going public by weighing the probability of deal success against offer...