In view of the growth and popularity of defined contribution pensions, along with the government's growing attention to retirement plan costs and investment choices provided, it is important to understand how people select their retirement plan investments. This paper shows how employees in a...

In this paper we show that institutional participation in the U.S. stock market in recent decades has played an ever increasing role in explaining cross-sectional variation in stock market illiquidity. We first document trends in the growth of institutional stock ownership using the 13F...

The observed predictability in indexes and domestic mutual funds has been attributed to stale prices. Market timing of mutual funds exploits this predictability. We show that there are few stale prices for stocks in the top few deciles of market value and that mutual funds concentrate their...

The costs of implementing investment strategies represent a significant drag on the performance of mutual funds and other institutional investors. It is the responsibility of institutional investors, and in the interests of the individual investors they represent, to seek market mechanisms that...

This paper documents the frequency of non-trading for NYSE and Amex stocks based on information in the CRSP monthly and daily data files. We find a declining pattern of non-trading over the 1926 to 1990 period: 23.4 percent of NYSE stocks do not trade on an average (end of the month) day during...