Investment consultants market their services by claiming that their fund manager recommendations add significant value. Using detailed data from the leading investment consultants we find no such evidence. An analysis of consultants' disclosures reveals a number of practices that explain their...

Financial and business services (FABS), including accounting, law and business consulting are crucial for understanding the world economy, and have attracted a lot of interdisciplinary research. Within this literature, however, there is a panoply of concepts that can easily perplex readers,...

FinTech (financial technology) is asserted as a disruptive paradigm with digital technologies driving authentic innovation within the financial services industry. Much attention and hyperbole has been attributed to startup FinTech developers and the potential of applications for consumers of...

Given the importance of sound advice in retail financial markets and the fact that financial institutions outsource their advice services, how should consumer protection law be set to maximize social welfare? We address this question by posing a theoretical model of retail markets in which a...

This paper uses one of the largest surveys of financial advisors to shed light on the key drivers of advisory firm growth. Firms offering a larger variety of services, such as education planning and account aggregation, experience a significantly higher growth in assets under management (AUM),...