I document portfolio pumping at the fund family level, a strategy that non-star fund managers buy stocks held by star funds in the family to inflate their performance at the quarter end. Families that heavily employ the strategy show strong evidence of inflated performance after 2002, when the...

Open-end mutual funds can use redemption in kind to satisfy investor redemptions by delivering securities instead of cash. We find that funds that reserve their rights to redeem in kind experience less redemption after poor performance. Evidence from actual in-kind transactions reveals several...

Open-end mutual funds can use redemption in kind to satisfy investor redemptions by delivering securities instead of cash. We find that funds that reserve their rightsto redeem in kind experience less redemption after poor performance. Evidence from actual in-kind transactions reveals several...

Corporate America today is astonishingly beholden to three large financial institutions: BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Global Advisors. As investors have moved their money into low cost, highly-diversified investment vehicles known as index funds, the so-called “Big Three”...

Delegated stock market participation is fragile, especially during crises. Investors who had delegated all of their equity investments to fund managers before the financial crisis were almost twice as susceptible to exiting the stock market during the crisis than their peers who invested in...

The expense ratio price of U.S. equity market exposure is close to zero with funds such as the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index (ticker: VTSAX), which charges an expense ratio of just 5 bps. An interesting, and more difficult, question to answer is, How much are mutual fund companies charging...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance of Greek equity mutual funds for the period 2012-2016, analyzing further selectivity and market timing ability, and short-term performance persistence for the period 2015-2016. Design/methodology/approach: Utilizing a survivorship...

Existing literature on exchange traded funds (“ETFs”) and conventional index mutual funds suggests that the two fund types are substitutes for each other in terms of attracting investors' money. Vanguard is an industry-leading index fund provider that offers both conventional index mutual...

This paper analyzes determinants of home bias in equity funds based on monthly holdings data using panel and quantile regressions. We investigate 699 equity funds, domiciled in fifteen European countries, that broadly invested in European stocks from January 2003 to December 2016. More than...