We analyze whether the growing importance of passive investors has influenced the campaigns, tactics, and successes of activists. We find activists are more likely to seek board representation when a larger share of the target company's stock is held by passively managed mutual funds....

We document that firms held by mutual fund managers who worked in public accounting earlier in their careers exhibit higher quality financial reporting. In cross-sectional evidence consistent with expectations, we find that the role that fund manager public accounting experience plays is...

In this work, we study the strategies driving cross-border sovereign wealth fund (SWF) investments worldwide. In particular, we investigate how SWFs internationalize their activities, studying whether the use of investment vehicles as signal of passive investment approach to access foreign...

We examine the dynamics of assets under management (AUM) and management fees at the portfolio manager level in the closed-end fund industry. We find that managers capitalize on good past performance and favorable investor perceptions about future performance, as reflected in fund premiums,...

This paper examines the influence corporate executives sitting on mutual fund boards exert on the investment decisions of the fund. Our results show that funds bias their holdings toward the executive's firm. Furthermore, we find that these funds trade informatively in the executive's firm, in...

This paper examines the influence corporate executives sitting on mutual fund boards exert on the investment decisions of the fund. Our results show that funds bias their holdings toward the executive's firm. Furthermore, we find that these funds trade informatively in the executive's firm, in...

A large and rapidly growing literature examines the impact of misvaluation on firm policies by using mutual fund outflow-induced price pressure to isolate non-fundamental price variation. I demonstrate that the standard approach to computing outflow-induced price pressure produces a measure that...

We examine changes to the products of public target firms after LBO using a novel dataset of firm products. We find that private equity funds cut target firms' new products after LBO, especially when there is less room to improve the target firm's performance through financial engineering....

This study examines auditor sharing by mutual fund trusts (collections of mutual funds) and parents (administrators of fund operations). We examine the determinants of auditor sharing and whether an association exists between trust audit fees and auditor sharing. Employing a sample of 2,369...

This paper studies the performance and persistence of Norwegian mutual funds utilizing a new data set of daily returns. Daily data allow us to evaluate the performance over short time horizons in a reliable manner, which is important because the risk exposure of funds can change over time. We...