Whether financial advisors provide useful services for clients that seek to invest in mutual funds remains an open question. We are the first to show that financial advisors generate tangible benefits for their clients in the form of useful tax advice. Specifically, financial advisors help...

We analyze the dispersion of month-end price marks simultaneously placed on identical corporate bonds by different US mutual fund managers before and after initiations of TRACE and introductions of issuers into Markit’s CDS database. Disseminated bonds show large and statistically significant...

We examine how speed of information diffusion within mutual fund families affects the performance and trading behavior of the corresponding member mutual funds. Timely information flows within the organization lead to better fund performance, and even more so when information flows across funds...

Mutual funds are part of larger organizations, which make decisions with consequences for all their member funds. This study examines how the efficiency of trading desks operated by fund families affects the performance and trading of affiliated funds. We introduce a novel approach to measure...

Rationality suggests that advice-seeking investors receive benefits from financial advice that are comparable in value to the fees paid for such advice. However, empirical evidence documenting these benefits for U.S. investors has so far been lacking. We document that U.S. mutual fund investors...

We document that prior work experience of mutual fund managers outside of the asset management industry is valuable from an investment perspective in that it provides managers with a stock picking and industry timing advantage. Fund managers' stock picks from industries where they previously...

This is the first study of corporate-bond mutual fund performance that examines detailed security-level holdings and returns. The new database allows us to decompose the costs and benefits of active management. In contrast to prior research on equity funds that shows evidence of stock-selection...

We study the dispersion of month-end valuations placed on identical corporate bonds by different mutual funds. Such dispersion is related to bond-specific characteristics associated with liquidity and market volatility. TRACE may have contributed to the general decline in dispersion over our...