Vanguard Group management, led by CEO John Brennan, was considering whether to launch exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in early 2000. ETFs, first created in the early 1990s, combined aspects of traditional mutual funds and closed-end funds. The US ETF industry had reached $36 billion in assets under...

The manager of the Japan Equities Fund is faced with an increase in "hot money" moving quickly in and out of the Fund. This short term trading is an attempt to take advantage of the difference between the closing times of the Tokyo and New York Stock Exchanges. The CFO of the fund manager...

This note is an excerpt from Professor Bob Pozen's book "The Mutual Fund Business" and is an introduction to mutual funds, contrasted with commercial banks.Learning Objective:To provide students with an introduction to mutual funds

John Mason, a principle at Oldwell Partners, was facing a decision of whether or not to invest in DiagnoFirst, a molecular diagnostics firm. DiagnoFirst's key product was a genetic test that identified a subset of prostate cancer patients with a high risk of clinical progression and death....

This paper examines the impact of unemployment insurance (UI) on aggregate employment by exploiting cross-state variation in the maximum benefit duration during the Great Recession. Comparing adjacent counties located in neighboring states, we find no statistically significant impact of...

Retirement savings abandonment is a rising concern connected to defined contribution systems and default enrollment. We use tax data on Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) to establish that for a recent cohort, 0.4% of retirement-age individuals abandoned an aggregate of $66 million, proxied...

In this paper, we study tax loss asymmetry for S-corporation owners. We find that these owners use approximately 70 percent of losses contemporaneously---which exceeds the loss use over ten years for C corporations. We simulate owner-level effective tax rates and find that, in spite of the high...

Using tax data, this paper exploits a discontinuous increase in retirement contribution limits based on exact date of birth. This paper finds clear evidence that constrained individuals increase their retirement saving when so eligible, but fi nds no evidence suggesting that non-retirement...

We study Roth conversions using administrative tax data on the universe of individuals who made conversions from 2003 through 2015. Specifically, we document time trends in conversions, investigate how the 2010 removal of Roth conversion income limits affected conversions in that year, show the...