Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and sustainability investing have become very popular with institutional, family office and more recently, retail investors. In the UK the range of ESG and sustainable funds for retail and high net worth (HNW) investors is still relatively small but...

Motivated by the observation that elderly liquidate their mutual fund holdings regularly, we examine whether mortality patterns have a predictable impact on aggregate mutual fund flows and asset prices. Our key conjecture is that periods with high mortality rates would be associated with higher...

By analyzing portfolio holdings, we find that a significant subset of Hedged Mutual Funds (HMFs) and smart-beta Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) tilt their portfolios towards well-known anomaly characteristics and that such tilts are highly persistent. Short positions of HMFs amplify their factor...

Why are there so few women in finance and even less managing funds? There is a major discrepancy between the number of female and male fund managers worldwide. The aim of this paper is to ascertain if gender is a contributing factor for fund managers performance. This is examined through...

How much of a difference do smart trading strategies, stock choice, and lending securities to short sellers reduce the net expenses of Vanguard’s index ETFs below their reported expense ratios? Using Vanguard’s reported returns for their index ETFs and their benchmarks I discover the return...

This paper contrasts the return of Vanguard and Fidelity active stock mutual funds with the style-mimicking portfolio of Vanguard’s index funds. Vanguard’s equally-weighted portfolio of domestic active funds out-returns the portfolio of Vanguard index funds with the same style, as does...

Alternative Mutual Funds (AMFs) follow strategies similar to those of hedge funds and seek returns uncorrelated with the market. We analyze the performance of AMFs for the period January, 1998 through December, 2011 using the Carhart four-factor model and the Fung-Hsieh seven-factor model. Our...

Using a large sample of institutional investors' investments in private equity funds raised between 1991 and 2011, we estimate the extent to which investors' skill affects their returns. Bootstrap analyses show that the variance of actual performance is higher than would be expected by chance,...

This study assesses the effect of fund-level and systemic factors on the performance of mutual funds in the context of changing market conditions. A Markov regime-switching model is used to analyze the performance of 33 South African equity mutual funds from 2006 to 2019. From the results, fund...