Using a comprehensive sample of U.S. mutual funds from 1992 to 2004, we find strong evidence that investment bank affiliated funds underperform unaffiliated funds. Consistent with the conflict of interest hypothesis, we find that affiliated funds hold disproportionately large amounts of stocks...

Historical differences in compensation may influence how representatives from broker-dealers, registered investment advisers, and dual registrants select funds. Evidence from advertising content suggests that active-fund families promote characteristics such as recent returns that are both...

Limited partners allocate capital into venture capital funds with the expectation of a risk-return profile matching the fund’s investment style in terms of startup investment stage, location, and industry. This paper draws a connection between style drifts in these three dimensions and the...

This paper investigates whether bond fund managers with credit rating experience outperform their peers. We document that bond fund managers who previously worked in credit rat- ing agencies on average create higher risk-adjusted returns than their peers by 11-16 bps per month, with better...

General Partners (GPs) in private equity face a trade-off between focusing their skills and effort on fewer investments to earn higher returns, or investing more broadly to reduce risk through diversification. Using a novel, deal-level dataset of 5,925 global investments from 1999 to 2016, we...

We propose a methodology to evaluate private equity investments by using investor-specific stochastic discount factors. The methodology allows a direct way of decomposing an investor's private-equity return into a risk-compensation and an "alpha". It also helps determine whether a given investor...

We investigate the role of alumni ties in university endowments' decision to invest into private equity funds. Based on a sample of 1,590 commitments made by 189 U.S. endowments into 613 funds during the period of 1995 to 2017, we show that endowments are more likely to invest into funds that...

This paper presents new evidence on performance persistence for U.S. private equity (buyout and venture capital) funds. We use high quality cash-flow data from Burgiss’s large sample of institutional investors (as of December 2020) which allows us to examine how persistence has changed over...

We explore how mutual fund investors collectively value sustainability when the tradeoff with performance becomes salient. Following the introduction of Morningstar’s sustainability ratings (the “globe” ratings), mutual funds increased their holdings of sustainable stocks in an attempt to...

This paper examines the determinants of private equity activity across Europe. We analyze a total of 43 explanatory variables, categorized into six groups: Economy; Finance and capital markets; Quality of institutions; Life quality; Economic freedom and Globalization. We assess their impact on...