Maximising returns is often the primary goal of asset management but managing and mitigating portfolio risk also plays a significant role. Successful active investing requires outperformance of a benchmark through skillful stock selection and market timing, but these bets necessarily give rise...

The market turmoil in March 2020 highlighted key vulnerabilities in the EU money market fund (MMF) sector. This paper assesses the effectiveness of the EU's regulatory framework from a financial stability perspective, based on a panel analysis of EU MMFs at a daily frequency. First, we find that...

Households participating in financial markets pay attention to inflation news when making their investment decisions, even in an environment of mostly low and stable inflation. ETFs and open-ended mutual funds holding Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) receive inflows from retail...

We explore how members of a collective pension scheme can share inflation risks in the absence of suitable financial market instruments. Using intergenerational risk sharing arrangements, risks can be allocated better across the various participants of a collective pension scheme than would be...

Using a sample of open-end corporate bond funds domiciled in the euro area, we exploit the COVID-19 market turmoil in March 2020 to examine two channels through which liquidity buffers can reduce procyclicality in the investment fund sector. First, we find that liquidity buffers reduced outflows...

Derivatives strategies that aim to earn variance risk premiums are exposed to sharp price declines during market crises, calling into question their suitability for the longterm investor. Our paper defines, analyzes, and proposes potential solutions to three problems (payoff, leverage and finite...

Co-investment, often seen as a remedy for agency problems, may incentivize managers to cater to own preferences. We provide evidence that mutual fund managers with considerable co-investment stakes alter risk-taking decisions to prioritize their own tax interests. By exploiting the enactment of...

Mutual fund families are increasingly assigning traders to manage corporate bond mutual funds. Using this setting to study the role of traders in investment management, we document that trader managers identify and exploit short-term trading opportunities at lower transaction costs. These skills...

In "Theory of Economic Regulation," Stigler introduces the ideas of demand for, and supply of regulation (Stigler, 1971). Similar to capture in regulation, consultants to institutional investors enhance the benefits of their own firms, create a loss in information ratio to their clients, and...

Measuring mutual fund managers' skills by Microsoft's TrueSkill algorithm, we find highly skilled managers to behave self-confident resulting in higher risk-taking in the second half of the year compared to less skilled managers. Introducing the TrueSkill algorithm, which is widely used in the...