We examine how active share—the extent to which a portfolio's holdings differ from its benchmark's holdings—affects the performance, risk management, and flows of bond mutual funds. Measuring active share at both the issue and issuer level, the average bond fund has an issue-level...

When using daily mutual fund returns to study the market timing, heavy tails and heteroscedasticity significantly challenge the existing methods. We to accommodate them, we propose a new measure and an efficient test for market timing ability and find that the traditional test misclassifies...

We find that a large portion of U.S. equity mutual funds almost second-order stochastically dominates the market portfolio. Consistent with the canonical definition of second-order stochastic dominance, both fund investors and managers reveal their preference for funds with a higher degree of...

Mutual funds hold 32% of the U.S. equity market and comprise 58% of retirement savings, yet retail investors consistently make poor choices when selecting funds. Theory suggests that poor choices are partially due to mutual fund managers creating unnecessarily complex disclosures and fee...

We recover a forward-looking distribution of expected abnormal returns (alphas)for active equity mutual funds from analyst ratings. Professional analysts believe thatalphas are dispersed, that the average fund will underperform, and that the largestfunds will outperform. We estimate a rational...

This paper develops a diagnostic tool for candidate performance measures that accounts for investor disagreement in mutual funds. We compare the evaluation for best clienteles, specified by an upper admissible performance bound, to the one for representative investors implicit in twelve models....

Limited partnerships are attractive investment vehicles for investors because, as limited partners, investors cannot lose more than their invested capital despite the leverage of the partnership's portfolio. Consistent with this, the availability of tax losses to a limited partner is also more...

Guided by a simple model in which hedge fund managers with access to less-profitable investment strategies take more funding risk, I show that funds with a high exposure to market-wide funding shocks - measured by changes in Libor-OIS spreads - subsequently underperform funds with a low exposure...

We measure the ability of professional investment managers in timing cashflow vs. discount-rate news, the two components of market returns. We find that the average U.S. equity mutual fund exhibits cashflow-timing skills of 2.12/year, but discount-rate timing of -0.84/year; further,...

Using data on Spanish mutual funds, we show that bank-affiliated funds provide funding support to their parent company via purchases of bonds in the primary market. Funding from affiliated funds increases when it is most valuable, i.e., in times of financial stress and to riskier banks with...