Just over 20 years have passed since the publication of Carhart's landmark 1997 study on mutual funds. Its conclusion—that the data did “not support the existence of skilled or informed mutual fund portfolio managers”—was the capstone of an academic literature beginning with Jensen...

Purpose Passive investing has established itself as the dominant force in the world of professionally managed assets, surpassing the concept of index funds. Its meteoric rise is fueled by investors' preference for its dual benefits of strong diversification and low cost. A comprehensive study of...

How does sovereign risk affect investors' behavior? We answer this question using a novel database that combines sovereign default probabilities for 27 developed and emerging markets with monthly data on the portfolios of individual bond mutual funds. We first show that changes in yields do not...

Fund managers are paid a fixed management fee in proportion to their assets under management. This means to maximize revenue, managers hoard assets. Whilst this results in increased revenue for the manager often, due to diseconomies of scale, it results in lower returns for the investor. Here we...

This paper shed light to the existence of momentum and reversal patterns in the 18 industry indexes of DJ Euro Stoxx. The analysis is focus on European market and test a presence structural break in year 2000 (financial services and markets act). We made an analysis of five portfolios over eight...

Long-short and market neutral funds seek superior risk-adjusted returns while limiting their exposure to stock market risk. Over the 1999 to 2013 period the number of funds with these investment objectives increased by over 700 percent. Despite their growing popularity, we find that long-short...

Many corporations and financial institutions have recently faced lawsuits in which plaintiffs have alleged harm to 401(k) plan participants by the inclusion of high-fee actively managed mutual funds in plan offerings, instead of low-cost index funds. The goal of our study is to compare the...

This Article attempts to define hedge funds and to distinguish them from a variety of similar investment funds. After reviewing the hedge fund definition in the U.S. and the EU, this Article argues that the current regulatory framework, which defines hedge funds by reference to what they are not...

U.S. equity mutual funds, on average, prefer realization of capital losses to capital gains. Nevertheless, a substantial fraction exhibits the disposition effect of realizing gains more readily than losses. My analysis suggests that learning effects have reduced the manifestation of the...