Rationality would suggest that advice-seeking investors receive benefits from costly financial advice. However, evidence documenting these benefits for U.S. investors has so far been lacking. This paper is the first to document that U.S. mutual fund investors indeed receive one of the many...

We document that speed of information dissemination within mutual fund families positively affects fund performance. This suggests that the resultant benefits of higher information precision far outweigh free-riding costs associated with fast internal dissemination. The performance effect is...

Sexual harassment, a widespread problem in the workplace, arguably keeps female employees from optimally employing their human capital. We show that removing or diminishing this friction improves productivity. Specifically, using the male-dominated fund industry as our testing ground, we show...

Using a novel return-based method to detect allocations of corporate bond offerings, which are underpriced on average, we find that mutual funds most active in the primary market generate significant alpha and outperform those that are less active. Our evidence suggests that underwriters direct...

To best utilize labor, companies need to match employees’ skills with jobs that best fit those skills. Exploiting unique features of the mutual fund industry, we identify instances when this matching happens for fund managers and study its consequences. After fund managers are matched, they...

Section 529 plans have experienced tremendous growth, yet we know little about how the incentives of their sponsors (i.e., states) and program managers affect investors. We study how the incentives of these key players relate to plan characteristics. Plans where states exhibit a greater tendency...

Despite six empirical studies published since 2000 designed to assess fund managers' REIT selection ability, their skill remains in question. Unlike previous studies, we examine fund holdings and trades of REITs to answer this question. This allows us to account for portfolio rebalancing that...

This study examines the performance of mutual funds managed by firms that simultaneously manage hedge funds. We find that the reported returns of mutual funds in these “side-by-side” associations with hedge funds significantly underperformed those of mutual funds that shared similar fund and...

Mutual fund families are increasingly assigning traders to manage corporate bond mutual funds. Using this setting to study the role of traders in investment management, we document that trader managers identify and exploit short-term trading opportunities at lower transaction costs. These skills...