The recent revelations of major scandal in the mutual funds industry have brought intense feelings of betrayal and financial loss to millions of fund shareholders, whose assets were improperly and illegally diminished. Shareholders need and deserve much greater protection and transparency of...

Only 11 of the 58 sample small-cap mutual funds are DEA efficient, and, of these, value funds represent by far the largest percentage. Twenty-five funds are least inefficient and 22 are inefficient. The mutual funds that are managerially inefficient tend to have the largest values for the seven...

This study uses the portion of a new Total Expense Ratio construct that discloses the reality of adviser/distributor payments of distribution fees (hidden) to sales brokers behind the mutual fund curtain. Distribution fees consist of dealer (broker) concessions, account servicing (12b-1) fees),...

The actual returns on mutual funds earned by investors are much lower than the rational behavior paradigm of financial economics would suggest. Certainly this is evidenced in the performance of funds distributed through the advisor channel. From the evidence here and elsewhere, much (if not...

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....

The revelations of major scandals in the mutual funds industry brought intense feelings of betrayal and financial loss to millions of fund shareholders, whose assets were improperly and illegally appropriated. Shareholders need and deserve much greater protection and transparency of normative...

The background to this study is the failure of mutual fund independent directors to fulfill their obligations as ldquo;shareholder watchdogs,rdquo; as defined in the Investment Company Act of 1940. Normative transparency of information is fund adviser disclosure proactively ldquo;requestedrdquo;...

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...