The subject of bank planning has received considerable attention in recent years. However, little relative attention has been devoted to strategic planning for new banks. This study reduces this void by providing some guidelines and thoughts pertaining to development of strategic plans for newly...

A highly developed system of financial markets and institutions is characteristic of a modern market economy. These markets, institutions and their financial instruments facilitate the efficient allocation of resources and thereby contribute to society's standard of living. The financial system...

The balancing of risk and return represents the classic investor dilemma. In theory, an investor seeks to maximize overall rate of return consistent with a desirable risk level. In practice, investor personal and financial characteristics may influence their risk/return preferences. Investors...

It is not enough to say that particular mutual funds have very excessive and most excessive expense ratios. In addition, these high cost funds are associated with negative portfolio characteristics that include more risky and less diversified portfolios, higher trading costs and lower earnings....

We investigate the relation between the performance and characteristics of 1,779 domestic, actively managed retail equity mutual funds with diverse expense ratios. We show that using expense ratio standard deviation classes is an effective method for characterizing fund expenses for investors....

We investigate the performance and attributes of 136 retail mutual funds tracking the Samp;P 500 Index across diverse expense ratio classes. Our performance measures are the Sharpe ratio, Jensen's alpha, and annualized total returns. Attributes analyzed for their relation to expense ratios...

Given their simplicity and presumed commodity-like nature, institutional Samp;P 500 Index mutual funds should be subject to active price competition, resulting in only nominal size-adjusted differences in expenses. We find a wide disparity among fund expense ratios and their corresponding...

In this study, we provide extensive evidence on the performance characteristics of 1,118 U.S. domestic, actively managed institutional equity mutual funds. We measure performance using such measures as three-year Sharpe ratios, Jensen's alphas, and Miller's active alphas as well as annualized...