This paper develops two measures of performance inconsistency based on information derived from funds' actual performance and their disclosed portfolio holdings. Using these measures, we show that funds with unskilled managers and poor performance are associated with greater inconsistency....

This paper studies the effect of new fund flows on investment behavior and the resulting equilibrium price of risk. The Small Fund Industry model shows equilibria with overinvestment in unprofitable and underinvestment in profitable investment opportunities. The Large Fund Industry model derives...

We study the relation between mutual fund trades and mass media coverage of stocks. We find that funds exhibit persistent differences in their propensity to buy media-covered stocks. Moreover, this propensity is negatively related to their future performance. Funds in the highest propensity...

We provide the first in-depth examination of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) within actively managed mutual fund (AMMF) portfolios to better understand why AMMFs make substantial investments in passive ETFs. We examine the association between holding ETF positions and AMMF performance, as well as...

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...

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...

Why do investors entrust active mutual fund managers with large sums of money while receiving negative excess returns on average? Our explanation is that investors have a coarser information set than fund managers which leads them to systematically misinterpret managers' skill. When investors...

This study applies an innovative return-based approach to determine the style-shifting activity of mutual funds. Based on daily returns, we measure style-shifting activity as inter-quarterly changes in the style exposures of a fund. In order to test the robustness of style-shifting activity we...

This study introduces an innovative approach to measuring the “style-shifting activity” (SSA) of mutual funds using daily returns. Applying our new measure to a comprehensive sample of 2631 active US equity mutual funds, we show (i) that SSA predicts future performance, especially for...

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...