Motivated by a growing trend where the increasing number of conventional mutual fund families have begun to offer exchange-traded funds (ETFs), we study the effects of ETFs on the actively managed mutual funds (active funds) in the same mutual fund family. Our difference-in-difference...

We examine how active share—the extent to which a portfolio's holdings differ from its benchmark's holdings—affects the performance, risk management, and flows of bond mutual funds. Measuring active share at both the issue and issuer level, the average bond fund has an issue-level...

We investigate the relationship between a mutual fund's variation in factor exposures and its future performance. Using a dynamic state space version of Carhart (1997)'s four factor model to capture factor variation, we find that funds with volatile factor exposures underperform funds with...

The mutual funds' returns, inter alia, are dependent on fund managers' performance. This makes human capital efficiency very central for consistent risk-adjusted performance. The persistence in performance becomes more critical during periods of high turbulence, like the one we are experiencing...

The past couple of decades have seen a significant shift from active to passive investment strategies. We examine how this shift affects financial stability through its impacts on: (i) funds' liquidity and redemption risks, (ii) asset-market volatility, (iii) asset-management industry...

We measure the liquidity profile of open-end mutual funds using the sensitivity of their daily returns to aggregate liquidity. We study how this sensitivity changes around real-activity macroeconomic announcements that reveal large surprises about the state of the economy and after three...

Why are investors still pouring money into active funds despite numerous findings of underperformance and growing supply of low-cost passive alternatives? Recent equity fund studies explain this behavior with a positive activity-performance relation. This study is the first consistently...

We propose a novel Trade Motivation Matrix (TMM) that allows differentiating funds' valuation-motivated (VM) and liquidity-motivated (LM) trades on single trade level. It thus enables analyses of stock-picking skill on three levels: trade, stock, and fund. On trade level, we find significant...

We propose that investor beliefs frequently “cross” in the sense that an investor may like company A, but dislike company B, while another investor may like company B, but dislike company A. Belief-crossing makes it almost impossible to construct a portfolio that is comprised solely of every...

This paper is the first to identify and classify virtually all investment instruments held by equity funds from their portfolio holdings. This enables us to analyze the effects of long and short exposures from different complex instruments including short sales, options and futures but also...