Sénéchal proposes a new analytical framework—the empirical law of active management—to assess the breadth, or diversification, and the skill of a portfolio manager. The framework requires no assumptions regarding a manager’s asset return expectations or investment process. The framework...

This paper explores the incentives for mutual funds to trade with sibling funds affiliated with the same group. To this end, we construct a dataset of almost one million equity transactions and compare the pricing of trades crossed internally (cross-trades) with that of twin trades executed with...

The mutual fund industry has experienced huge growth internationally, becoming one of the primary vehicles through which individuals and most institutions invest in capital markets. Thus, the evaluation of the performance of mutual funds has become a very interesting research topic both for...

This paper proposes a model of asset-market equilibrium with portfolio delegation and optimal fee contracts. Fund managers and investors strategically interact to determine funds' investment profiles, while they share portfolio risk through fee contracts. In equilibrium, their investment...

As institutional investors have become more aggressive in deploying their capital, fund managers have become more creative with their product offerings. In this paper, we consider a new institutional fund of mutual funds, a portfolio that combines the “best-idea” stocks from two underlying...

This paper introduces a general continuous-time mathematical framework for solution of dynamic mean-variance control problems. We obtain theoretical results for two classes of functionals: the first one depends on the whole trajectory of the controlled process and the second one is based on its...

We posit a fund manager and an individual investor who maximize the expected (log) utility of their respective terminal wealth. The manager possesses more information than the investor does and charges the latter, her would-be customer, a linear compensation fee. The investor will delegate his...

I find that the risk correction in the Daniel et al. (1997) (DGTW) benchmarks is less than perfect. In light of the small 79bps selection skill DGTW find, a more precise risk measure is required. I use the utility based performance measure suggested by Goetzmann et al. (2007) (MPPM) and compare...

This paper examines the determinants of cross-sectional variation in post-merger mutual fund performance. Mergers between funds with similar management objectives, as reflected by average portfolio book-to-market ratio, price-earnings ratio, beta and market capitalization values, outperform...