We study the relation between mutual fund managers' family backgrounds and their professional performance. Using hand-collected data from individual Census records on the wealth and income of managers' parents, we find that managers from poor families deliver higher alphas than managers from...

We study the relation between mutual fund managers' family backgrounds and their professional performance. Using hand-collected data from individual Census records on the wealth and income of managers' parents, we find that managers from poor families deliver higher alphas than managers from...

Short sellers trade more on days with qualitative news -- i.e. news containing fewer numbers. We show that this behavior is not informationally motivated but can be explained by short sellers exploiting higher liquidity on such days. We document that liquidity and noise trading increase in the...

We study the relationship between asset prices and short sale constraints by investigating how characteristics of institutional investors affect their willingness to lend stock to short sellers. We find that stocks with higher portfolio weights and stocks in which institutional investors traded...

We investigate how short sellers strategically exploit the liquidity generated by the arrival of ambiguous information – i.e. information likely to cause disagreement in interpretation. Using a sample of newspaper articles, media newswires, and press releases, we construct a measure of...

We study outsourcing relationships among international asset management firms. We find that in companies that manage both outsourced and inhouse funds, inhouse funds outperform outsourced funds by 0.85% annually (57% of the expense ratio). We attribute this result to preferential treatment of...