The Italian mutual fund industry is in a severe crisis: its net assets have been experiencing a constant decrease since 1999, from 42% of GDP to 8% in 2011. Its returns are poor, too. An investment in mutual funds has accumulated in its 28-year life a loss larger than the initial asset value, if...

This paper questions the contribution that socially responsible (SR) screening makes to mutual fund performance. We propose a new decomposition of the variability of SR mutual fund returns making it possible to isolate the contribution of SR screening and compare it with the other traditional...

Private equity funds hold assets that are hard to value. Managers may have an incentive to distort reported valuations if these are used by investors to decide on commitments to subsequent funds managed by the same firm. Using a large dataset of buyout and venture funds, we test for the presence...

Title IV of the Dodd-Frank Act introduced the most significant regulatory change in the history of the private fund industry. To analyze the effect of Title IV on the private fund industry, we use five years of private fund performance data with over 7,000 reporting private funds. Our findings...

This study examines how the efficiency of trading desks operated by mutual fund families affects the performance and trading of affiliated funds. We estimate the trading efficiency of a fund family's trading desk as the difference between the gross return of the family's index fund, which...

Actively managed mutual funds sell the potential to beat the market by picking stocks that are expected to outperform passive benchmarks like the S&P 500. Funds that are marketed as active vary substantially in the degree to which their portfolio holdings actually differ from the holdings of...

In the maturing Private Equity industry, investments where the Private Equity fund owns a minority of the equity – as a different form of investment – are gaining influence. Those minority investments use different instruments for value creation than classic majority investments and involve...

As of 31 December 2016 investment fund managers in the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA) managed more than €14trillion, equivalent to 33.2% of worldwide investment fund assets. More importantly all asset classes and fund types experience significant growth for more than...