Both Kosowski et al. (2006) and Fama and French (2010) evaluate whether mutual funds outperform, but their conclusions are very different. We reconcile their findings. We show that the Fama and French method suffers from an undersampling problem that leads to a failure to reject the null...

We use unique institutional securities holdings data to examine the trading behaviour of delegated institutional capital and its impact on bond risk premia. We show that institutional fund managers trade strongly procyclically: they actively move into higher yielding, longer duration and lower...

Taking a firm's competitive position into account benefits investors who are better at evaluating this qualitative information. I find that fund managers who overweight companies with market power outperform their peers. Placebo exercises and an exogenous shock to product market competition...

While it is established that idiosyncratic volatility has a negative impact on the cross-section of future stock returns, the relationship between idiosyncratic volatility and future hedge fund returns is largely unexplored. We document that hedge funds with high idiosyncratic volatility...

This study provides evidence for a positive association between mutual fund holdings’implied cost of capital (ICC) and future performance. Consistent with large transactioncosts of ICC-based investments impeding their exploitation and employing a ICC-basedstrategy reflecting skill,...

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance of US mutual funds that invest primarily in emerging market equities and bonds. Design/methodology/approach - The study adopts the Morningstar classification of mutual funds and uses the Lipper US Mutual Fund Database through...

Institutional funds have concentrated ownership by a few institutional investors, infrequent outflows and essentially no leverage. Yet using unique granular data on the bond holdings of institutional funds, we show that their trading behavior is strongly procyclical: they actively move into...

In contrast with theoretical predictions, high-fee active equity funds generate worse net-of-expenses performance. We show that this fee-performance puzzle is driven by the preference of high-fee funds for stocks with low operating profitability and high investment rates, characteristics...

We propose a new approach for estimating mutual fund performance that simultaneously controls for both factor exposure and firm characteristics. This double-adjusted alpha is motivated by the recent findings that traditional Fama-French style factor models do not fully adjust returns for the...

This paper uses proprietary data from a leading intermediary to understand the magnitude and determinants of transaction costs in the secondary market for private equity stakes. Most transactions occur at a discount to net asset value. Buyers average an annualized public market equivalent of...