This review surveys the literature on the economics of mutual funds in general, and open-end mutual funds in particular. This mutual fund design has been very successful, though it carries risks that have recently been realized at large scales. It also frustrates the analysis of performance in...

Governments often regulate marketing activities to ensure marketers do not misinform consumers and obtain ‘unfair' advantages. Yet, ample research finds such regulations may be ineffective since marketers are able to circumvent them. We examine if umbrella branding, a marketing strategy of...

The October, 2016 money-fund reform obliged institutional prime funds to start floating their Net Asset Values (NAVs), whereas retail prime funds could continue with stable NAVs. We use this contrast to assess the effect of NAV flotation on fund management. We find that institutional funds...

Speed is a critical feature of modern capital markets. To identify the effects of speed in U.S. corporate bond markets, we use eligibility cutoffs that allow ``well-known seasoned issuers'' (WKSI) to accelerate issuances and reduce review time. After determining that this change initiated...

The literature documents a convex relation between past returns and fund flows of mutual funds. We show this to be consistent with fund incentives, because funds discard exactly those strategies which underperform. Past returns tell less about the future performance of funds which discard, so...

A weekly database of retail money fund portfolio statistics is uneconomical for retail investors to observe, so it allows direct comparison of disclosed and undisclosed portfolios. This allows for a more direct and unambiguous test for quot;window dressingquot; than elsewhere in the literature....

Commercial paper sells at an extra discount if it matures in the next calendar year but Treasury bills do not. The discount is apparent in downward price shifts before the year-end, and upward price shifts at the turn of the year which are significantly correlated with the simultaneous returns...

To compute risk-adjusted returns and gauge the volatility of their portfolios, lenders need to know the covariances of their loans' returns with aggregate returns. Cross-sectional differences in these covariances also provide insight into the nature of the shocks hitting different types of...

The financial crisis saw a large premium paid for Treasury notes over bonds, reaching six percent of face value. We relate this premium to the underlying sources of liquidity supply and demand. On the supply side, we find that arbitrageurs faced low direct costs but high frictions, and that the...

We trace the evolution of extreme illiquidity discounts among Treasury securities during the financial crisis, when bond prices fell more than six percent below more-liquid but otherwise identical notes. Using high-resolution data on market quality and trader identities and characteristics, we...