We develop a theoretical model of a mutual fund manager’s investment decision that incorporates three well-known observations: (i) past fund performance influences subsequent net fund inflows; (ii) fund manager compensation rises with total assets under management; (iii) trading has short-run...

This paper develops a simple technique that properly controls for “false discoveries,” or mutual funds that exhibit significant alphas by luck alone, to evaluate the performance of actively managed U.S. domestic-equity mutual funds during the 1975 to 2006 period. Our approach precisely...

This paper provides a review of the methods for measuring portfolio performance and the evidence on the performance of professionally managed investment portfolios. Traditional performance measures, strongly influenced by the Capital Asset Pricing Model of Sharpe (1964), were developed prior to...

The Italian mutual fund industry is in a severe crisis. Its net assets have been decreasing since 1999, from 42% of GDP to 8% in 2011; an investment in mutual funds has accumulated in its 28-year life a loss larger than the initial asset value, if compared to an investment in one-year treasury...

Purpose – The Treynor and Mazuy framework is a widely used return-based model of market timing. However, existing corrections to the regression intercept can be manipulated through derivatives trading. Because they are conceptually flawed, these corrections produce biased performance measures....