This paper offers a comprehensive study of survivorship issues, in the context of mutual fund research, using the mutual fund data set of Carhart (1997). We find that funds in our sample disappear primarily because of multi-year poor performance.(...)

Options have become a major component of corporate compensation. Their cost to firms depends on the exercise policies of executives who face hedging constraints. This paper analyzes the optimal policy and option cost for an executive with general concave utility. We show analytically how the...

The literature traditionally assumes that a portfolio manager who expends costly effort to generate information makes an unrestricted portfolio choice and is paid according to a sharing rule. However, the revelation principle provides a more efficient institution. If credible communication of...

We generate samples of fund returns calibrated to match the U.S. mutual fund industry and simulate standard tests of performance persistence. We consider a variety of alternative return generating processes, survival criteria, and test methodologies. When survival depends on performance over...

This article examines whether insiders use private information to time the exercises of their executive stock options. Before May 1991, insiders had to hold the stock acquired through option exercise for 6 months. Exercises from that regime precede significantly positive abnormal stock...