In this Article, we examine the content and compliance of mutual fund summary prospectuses. Fund disclosures are subject to `plain English' requirements promising to make disclosures accessible to ordinary investors and level the investment playing field. Despite recent SEC regulations intending...

This paper examines experimentally the reputation building role of disclosure in an investment / trust game. It provides experimental evidence in support of sequential equilibrium behavior in a finitely repeated investment / trust game where information asymmetry raises the possibility of...

We examine the impact of regulatory scrutiny on mutual fund disclosures. Based on a sample of 16,161 comment letter conversations between the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Investment Management and mutual funds from 2004 to 2019, we find that: (i) while comment letters...

I show that the disclosure of mutual funds’ holdings significantly affects investors’ investment decisions. As most mutual fund websites, advertisements, and fund-trading platforms only disclose a fund’s 10 largest holdings (top-10), this study finds that investors disproportionately focus...

Valuation risk of a security—uncertainty about its fair value—is a subject of considerable concern in the mutual fund industry. If funds report different values for identical securities, investors cannot easily compare performance. Yet it is not unusual to see identical illiquid stocks,...

Scholars have roundly criticized disclosure as a regulatory regime over the past decade for good reason. Disclosures—whether describing the terms of a loan or the risks of investing—purport to inform consumers. But who actually reads disclosures? We argue that mutual fund disclosures are...

We examine whether ESG funds’ investment decisions are sensitive to firms’ environmental disclosures, beyond summary ESG ratings. We create our measures of environmental disclosure using bigrams extracted from the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards trained against authoritative...