Using a sample of daily net flows to nearly 1,000 U.S. mutual funds over a year and a half period, we identify a set of systematic factors that explain a significant amount of the variation in flows. This suggests the existence of a common component to mutual fund investor behavior and indicates...

Home ownership increases the incentive to maintain property and neighborhood, as well as decreasing the outflow of rents from low-income zones. However, these benefits are not costless to homeowners. With a mortgage comes the possibility of default, the financial demands of maintenance, a...

We experimentally explore if the absence of dividend anchors (from which investors can backward induct to arrive at the fundamental value) may help us understand the formation of security price bubbles. The fundamental value models assume that the investors (a) form rational expectations,(b)...

This Article analyzes the functions served by the law of trusts and asks, first, whether the basic tools of contract and agency law could fulfill the same functions and, second, whether trust law provides benefits that are not provided by the law of corporations. The analysis is motivated in...

Abstract: This paper analyzes a new database of substantially all stocks listed on the NYSE over its early history. We collect prices and dividends from primary sources -- i.e. financial periodicals -- for all listed stocks on the New York Stock Exchange over its early history. We construct a...

Balancing the needs of information distributors and their audiences has grown harder in the age of the Internet. While the demand for attention continues to increase rapidly with the volume of information and communication, the supply of human attention is relatively fixed. Markets are a social...

This paper examines the correlation between stock and bond returns. It first documents that the major trends in stock-bond correlation for G7 countries follow a similar reverting pattern in the past forty years. Next, an asset pricing model is employed to show that the correlation of stock and...

We examine the performance of the off-shore hedge fund industry over the period 1989 through 1995 using a database that includes both defunct and currently operating funds. The industry is characterized by high attrition rates of funds, low covariance with the U.S. stock market, evidence...

New York City provides many of its services via contracts with nonprofit agencies. In this paper, we report on a recent survey of the governance practices of those agencies. The survey collected information from the Executive Directors of over 400 city contractors and more than 4000 of the board...

This study examines the diversification decisions of more than 60,000 individual investors during a six year period (1991-96) in recent U.S. capital market history. The majority of investors in our sample are under-diversified and the extent of under-diversification is more severe in retirement...