This paper studies the role of mutual fund yield in driving investor flows and performance of bond funds. Using two common measures, the SEC yield and 12-month distribution yield, we find strong evidence that investors tend to chase bond funds with higher yields, even after controlling for total...

Do politically diverse teams perform worse when political disagreement increases? No – despite greater political disagreement during Covid-19, politically diverse mutual fund teams outperform in terms of both fund returns and fund flows. Return outperformance is driven by pre-existing...

This paper studies the investment behavior of investors and fund managers within the mutual funds industry. We find that investors are biased in their fund purchase decisions in a way described by prospect theory: The prospect theory value predicts future fund flows, even though it is not...

An endowment fund serves as a permanent source of capital to support a specific mission. It has, in the case of a university, dual goals of providing current financial support to the university and preserving long-term purchasing power to ensure that support continues in perpetuity. This article...

Taking a firm's competitive position into account benefits investors who are better at evaluating this qualitative information. I find that fund managers who overweight companies with market power outperform their peers. Placebo exercises and an exogenous shock to product market competition...

This paper documents that mutual fund managers who experience distress in one fund tend to subsequently take on more risk in other funds they manage. Specifically, portfolio managers decrease the cash holdings and increase the systematic risk component in their linked funds. This increased...

Using a sample of Chinese mutual funds from 2004 to 2019, we find that investors direct flows into (out of) funds with salient upsides (downsides), controlling for a set of known determinants of fund flows. This effect is robust to alternative measures of key variables and is more pronounced for...

The market for auction rate securities collapsed in February 2008, significantly constraining some closed-end funds' access to leverage. We use this exogenous shock to study empirically how leverage constraints affect investors' portfolio choice. We find that tightened constraints result in an...

I explore whether managers of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) funds differ in their disclosure behavior vis-a-vis conventional fund managers. Consistent with ESG fund investors having longer investment horizons, I find that ESG portfolio managers engage in less opportunistic...

Warren Buffett (1984) presents a group of investors with long-term performance records far superior than the market. Applying an array of prominent performance evaluation models, capturing relative, absolute, density based, and utility-based measures, does little to refute the conclusions of...