We find that active mutual funds owning product market competitors have superior risk-adjusted returns that are not driven by industry concentration, common selection, or stock picking ability. These funds charge higher fees but also generate persistent net-of-fee returns for investors. Funds...

Combining novel data on analyst employment history and mutual fund commission payments, we show that client funds generate higher returns on stocks for which they have access to research by industry expert analysts. The outperformance is greater when funds are more important clients, and it...

We find that mutual fund investors care about the uncertainty associated with the fund's skills, which is neglected by the existing literature. We propose a measure named Confidence in the Fund's Skills (CFS) to investigate this question empirically. CFS has a significantly positive impact on...

This paper empirically investigates a demand-side channel through which market uncertainty affects the liquidity premium. Using data at the mutual fund level, I document that fund managers actively shift the composition of their portfolio toward more liquid assets during high volatility periods....

Purpose This paper empirically investigates the performance of Islamic funds, which have been praised for weathering the 2008 financial storm relatively well and compares it to a European product designed to protect the most vulnerable of investors, UCITS funds. Design/methodology/approach This...

Performance regressions lever expected benchmark returns linearly to the risk exposures of the fund. The interest rate (IR) risk premium, however, usually follows a decreasingly upward-sloping yield curve, characterizing the nonlinearity between expected return and IR risk exposure, e.g....

We conduct a volatility decomposition to identify the source of performance differences between low volatility and high volatility mutual funds. A higher level of return covariance of fund holdings is associated with more fund-level exposure to the idiosyncratic volatility effect. Average...

We evaluate the performance of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered mutual funds. We find that these funds do not outperform the market per se. However, a comparison shows that AI-powered funds significantly outperform their human-managed peer funds. We further show that the outperformance of AI...

In this article, we contribute to the discussion in the financial literature about performance persistence by examining the issue of persistence in short-term mutual fund performance in the Scandinavian countries between 1990 and 2020. We use a unique sample of equity funds investing locally...

The adequate evaluation of mutual fund performance and of the fund managers’ ability to add value is an issue to which it has been given special attention in the recent financial literature. One of the traditional evaluation measures most commonly used is Carhart's alpha. However, one of the...