Political beliefs matter for the behavior of institutional investors. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we show that whether a mutual fund team is Republican or Democratic has a first-order effect on the fund’s portfolio choice. Before and after the 2016 Presidential election, Republican teams...

This paper investigates the purchases and redemptions of a large cross-sectional sample of German equity funds. We find that investors punish bad performance by selling their shares, but also have a tendency to sell winners. Investors in large fund families show higher sales and redemption...

We provide evidence regarding mutual funds' motivation to hold lottery stocks. Funds with higher managerial ownership invest less in lottery stocks, suggesting that managers themselves do not prefer such stocks. The evidence instead supports that managers cater to fund investors' preference for...

This paper analyzes how the existence of sector funds (specialists) within a mutual fund family affects the performance and investment behavior of affiliated diversified equity funds (generalists). First of all, I show that specialists have stock picking skills. Second, information flows from...

Why do investors entrust active mutual fund managers with large sums of money while receiving negative excess returns on average? Our explanation is that investors have a coarser information set than fund managers which leads them to systematically misinterpret managers' skill. When investors...

We show that early-life family disruption (death or divorce of a parent) causes fund managers to be more risk averse when they manage their own funds. Treated managers take lower systematic, idiosyncratic, and downside risk than non-treated managers. This effect is most pronounced for managers...

We show that mutual funds compete for climate-conscious investment flows. In April 2018, Morningstar introduced a climate-focused label for mutual funds. The release of the "Low Carbon Designation" induced reactions on both the demand and supply sides of the market. First, investors flocked to...

We present a model with dynamic investment flows, where fund managers have the ability to generate excess returns and study how forcing them to commit part or all of their personal wealth to the fund they manage affects fund risk taking. We contrast the behavior of a manager that may invest her...

Using a novel database, we show that the stock-price impact of analyst trade ideas is at least as large as the impact of stock recommendation, target price, and earnings forecast changes, and that investors following trade ideas can earn significant abnormal returns. Trade ideas triggered by...

This chapter evaluates the returns of the domestic equity funds of three major American companies: Vanguard, Fidelity, and Dimensional Fund Advisors relative to benchmarks using the Fama-French factors from January 2001 through December 2018. We also present Sharpe's (1992) style analysis...