We uncover a negative relation between herding behavior and skill in the mutual fund industry. Our new, dynamic measure of fund-level herding captures the tendency of fund managers to follow the trades of the institutional crowd. We find that herding funds underperform their antiherding peers by...

Islamic finance is a set of financial institutions representing a connected financial architecture that works based on prescribed Shari'ah principles. Growth in the industry has been stellar, but, certain principles, the strategic direction and the practices do not warrant celebration yet. This...

We explore the trading decisions of equity mutual funds during ten periods of extreme market uncertainty. We find that mutual funds reduced their aggregate holdings of illiquid stocks. Exploring the drivers behind this result reveals that this is mainly driven by larger withdrawals from funds...

Is alpha a property of the hedge fund or the individual hedge fund manager? By means of panel regressions on a novel data set, identifying the work histories of individual hedge fund managers, I show that there exist significant managerial fixed effects in abnormal returns. A change in a hedge...

One dollar in purchases or redemptions generates an average cost of $0.006 for U.S. equity mutual funds during the period 1997-2009, approximately 70% lower than prior estimates derived from older data. However, large cross-sectional differences exist between funds. Many funds have costs near...

When assessing a fund manager's skill, sophisticated investors will consider all factors (priced and unpriced) that explain cross-sectional variation in fund performance. We investigate which factors investors attend to by analyzing mutual fund flows as a function of recent returns decomposed...

This article describes the evolution of the Brazilian mutual fund industry, its regulatory framework, organization, types of investors and managers, economic environment and its relative growth. It shows the evolution of this industry in Brazil and its idiosyncrasies providing a deeper look into...

Passive investing, particularly in emerging markets, has become an increasingly popular means of quick, “diversified” exposure to a particular segment of the markets. Flows into passive emerging market products have been so strong that assets in exchange-traded funds (ETFs) designed to...

One of the most crucial decisions for investors and plan sponsors is the selection of funds among the thousands of available alternatives. We stress that an investor first needs to specify a target alpha, i.e., the expected fund return in excess of a benchmark, and that the target alpha...

One of the significant developments in the investing community is the rise of socially responsible or ethical investments during last two decades. Because of the increasing size and importance of ethical mutual funds, this paper seeks to evaluate and compare the performance of ethical mutual...