Using a proprietary database of predominantly small to mid-size 401(k) plans administered by nearly 400 unique third-party plan administrators (TPAs), we examine the potential effects of a conflict of interest that arises from the TPA's incentive to recommend its funds for the investment menu....

We examine corporate tax avoidance of firms around addition to the S&P 500 index. We find that corporate tax avoidance for firms at high levels of tax avoidance decreases after index addition, whereas tax avoidance for firms at low levels of tax avoidance increases after index addition. We...

We examine how corporate governance affects the relationship between corporate tax avoidance and financial constraints. Conditional on having poor governance, tax avoidance is associated with greater financial constraints and a greater likelihood of financial distress. In firms with strong...

We document evidence that mutual funds, on average, are averse to investing in tax-avoiding firms, which seems anomalous given mutual fund managers' incentive structure. Our results remain unchanged when we address endogeneity concerns using several methods, including identification through...

Structural factors which cause irrational investment in defined contribution savings plans are of great concern. Using a proprietary database of 401(k) plans we show that alphabeticity – the order that fund names appear when listed in alphabetical order – significantly biases participants'...

Administration of defined contribution retirement plans is generally outsourced by plan sponsors to third-party financial institutions, resulting in two primary types of plan fees. While investment fund fees in defined contribution plans have been heavily scrutinized, the administrative fees...

We first highlight critical subtleties in the application of the standard Wald test for regression-based mean-variance spanning under short-sales constraints. We address the issue of near-singularity in particular by appealing to a characterization of stochastic discount factors in the presence...

We examine whether corporate tax avoidance impacts the investment decisions of socially responsible investment (SRI) mutual funds. After controlling for corporate social responsibility (CSR) constructs, we find that investment by SRI funds is positively associated with paying corporate taxes....

We address implementation issues related to Wald tests associated with mean-variance spanning when short positions in portfolios are prohibited. In particular, we exploit the uniqueness of the stochastic discount factor in the presence of a risk-free rate to avoid potential numerical stability...