Interest rates dived into uncharted territories for an extended period after the financial crisis. What is the impact on investor behavior and asset prices? We find that when interest rates fall, flows into income-oriented equity funds increase, with higher dividend-yielding funds attracting...

Western contract law and the principle of freedom of contract are based on two premises: private ownership and a free market. This paper argues that freedom of contract is not applicable to Chinese state-owned enterprises due to the unique economic conditions surrounding Chinese SOEs:...

We propose a new measure, active fundamental performance (AFP), to identify skilled mutual fund managers. AFP evaluates fund investment skills conditioned on the release of firms' fundamental information. For each fund, we examine the covariance between deviations of its portfolio weights from a...

In the past 15 years, Delaware courts seem to have created a rule that allowed sophisticated parties to contract around fraud by using an unambiguous disclaimer and integration clause. Supposedly, an extra-contractual fraud claim would be dismissed had there been an unambiguous disclaimer....

Corporate bond mutual funds tend to hold illiquid assets but provide liquid claims to their investors. How do they manage liquidity to meet investor redemptions? We show that, during tranquil market conditions, these funds tend to reduce liquid asset holdings such as cash and government bonds to...

This article is on the hidden state interest that article 52(§1) of the Chinese Contract Law protects and the questionable applicability of freedom of contract to Chinese state-owned enterprises (hereafter “SOEs”). In common law, fraud and duress make a contract voidable. In Western civil...

Whenever a court enforces a bargain, it does so against someone who regrets having made it. Why should he be bound? Our thesis is that, in principle, a contract of exchange should be enforced when it is economically fair and voluntary. It is economically fair when the performance that each party...

We propose a novel high-frequency decomposition of daily stock returns into news- and non-news-driven components, and uncover evidence of pervasive stock market underreaction to firm news. Prices tend to drift in the same direction as the initial market response for several days after the news...

Investment in bond mutual funds has grown rapidly in recent years. With it, there is a growing concern that they are a new source of potential fragility. While there is a vast literature on flows in equity mutual funds, relatively little research has been done on bond mutual funds. In this...