This questionnaire survey of fund managers in the United States, Germany and Switzerland documents a distinctly positive influence of bonus payments on investment behavior on both sides of the Atlantic. Higher bonus payments are significantly related to higher working effort but not to risk...

In dieser Arbeit untersuchen wir Höhe und Struktur der Vergütung von Fondsmanagern und erklären diese durch Eigenschaften des Arbeitnehmers, des Arbeitgebers und des Arbeitsplatzes. Insgesamt verdienen deutsche Fondsmanager weniger als ihre merikanischen Kollegen. Die Vergütungshöhe hängt...

We study the effects of local religious beliefs on mutual fund risk-taking behaviors. Funds located in low-Protestant or high-Catholic areas exhibit significantly higher fund return volatilities. Similar differences persist when we use the religiosity ratios at fund managers' college locations....

I find that home-country culture affects portfolio managers' investment risk-taking and performance. I focus on security value, which measures the degree to which people in a country assign importance to security, safety, and stability. Funds managed by managers from countries with higher...

This paper studies the effect of portfolio manager ownership (i.e., skin in the game) on mutual fund risk taking. Using holdings-based risk change measures that capture managers' ex ante risk choices, we find that portfolio manager ownership reduces both intra-year and across-year risk-taking...

Prior theory suggests that time variation in the degree to which leverage constraints bind affects the pricing kernel. We propose a measure for this leverage constraint tightness by inverting the argument that constrained investors tilt their portfolios to riskier assets. We show that the...

We study how culture influences mutual funds around the world. Uncertainty Avoidance (UA), which is related to ambiguity aversion, is negatively associated with flow-performance sensitivity, deviation from the fund benchmark, fund alpha, and the fraction of active management across the 25...

Mutual fund risk-taking via active portfolio rebalancing varies both in the crosssection and over time. In this paper, I show that the same is true for funds' off- balance sheet risk-taking, even after controlling for on-balance sheet activities. For this purpose, I propose a novel measure of...

The investment fund sector has expanded dramatically since the crisis of 2008-2009. As the sector grows, so do the implications of its risk-taking for the wider financial system and real economy. This paper provides empirical evidence for the existence of wide- spread risk-taking incentives in...