Pension funds have greater fiduciary responsibilities than mutual funds and are also more severely punished for poor performance. Thus pension funds may find it particularly risky to deviate from peers. Consistent with this view, we find that pension funds herd and that their herding negatively...

This multi-faceted analysis of institutional investment defines fiduciary finance institutions as the third pillar of the financial system, alongside banks and insurers. It documents the role played by investment funds and the money management industry during the recent financial crisis, and...

Mutual funds are held by investors in taxable and tax-qualified retirement accounts. We investigate whether the characteristics, investment strategies, and performance of mutual funds held by these diverse tax clienteles differ. Examining both mutual fund distributions and mutual fund holdings,...

Recently, commodity index investing has come under attack. A Staff Report by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation (hereafter, the "subcommittee report") "…finds that there is significant and persuasive evidence to conclude that these commodity index traders, in the...

Hedge Fund returns are often highly serially correlated mainly due to illiquidity exposures given that investments in such securities tend to be inactively traded and associated market prices are not always readily available. Following that, observed returns of such alternative investments tend...

Long‐horizon investors have an edge. They can ride out short‐term fluctuations in risk premiums, profit from periods of elevated risk aversions and short‐term mispricing, and they can pursue illiquid investment opportunities. The turmoil we have seen in the capital markets over the last...

This paper shows that the stylized fact of average mutual fund underperformance documented in the literature stems from expansion periods when funds have statistically significant negative risk-adjusted performance and not recession periods when risk-adjusted fund performance is positive. These...

The doctrine of “Stocks for the Long Run” has been the cornerstone of strategic asset allocation portfolios for many decades. The catalysts of this phenomenon were the contemporaneous onset of the 1980-2000 bull market, one of the strongest in history, and the emergence of modern financial...

This article analyzes the manifold situations in which the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) has influenced — or has failed to influence — federal securities regulation and state corporate law, and the prospective roles for the EMH in these contexts. In federal securities regulation, the EMH...

This paper shows that the new financial regulation introduced in 2007 in the Netherlands, the so-called nieuw Financieel Toetsings Kader (nFTK), has several basic flaws. The nFTK evaluation cannot be trusted. The results are misleading and must not be used for policy decisions. 'Funding...