This article provides a comprehensive study of survivorship issues using the mutual fund data of Carhart (1997). We demonstrate theoretically that when survival depends on multiperiod performance, the survivorship bias in average performance typically increases with the sample length. This is...

Cash flows between investors and funds are both cause and effect in a complex web of economic decisions. Among the issues at stake are the prospects and fees of the funds, the efforts and risk choices by the funds’ managers, the pricing and comovement of the assets they trade, the stability of...

This paper takes a portfolio view of consumer credit. Default models (credit-risk scores) estimate the probability of default of individual loans. But to compute risk-adjusted returns, lenders also need to know the covariances of the returns on their loans with aggregate returns. Covariances are...

This paper considers the economic role of fees in aligning the incentives of money managers with those of investors. We examine a simple model in which manager effort (or investment in human and physical capital) is observed by the investor prior to her investment decision, but is not...