Processing qualitative information about a firm's product market competition matters for professional investors. Consistent with a superior understanding of a firm's market power, fund managers who overweight companies with the fewest competitors (monopolies) outperform their peers. An exogenous...

Is there a gap between the profitability of a trading strategy “on paper” and that which is achieved in practice? We answer this question by developing a general technique to measure the real-world implementation costs of financial market anomalies. Our method extends Fama-MacBeth...

Using a sample of U.S. international equity mutual funds, we show that funds that hire sub-advisors abroad do not outperform. For example, funds that hire outsourced international sub-advisors underperform on a risk-adjusted basis by up to 126 bps annually, relative to funds that do not...

This paper studies the added value of intentional style herding for mutual fund managers. We find that herding in styles is significant and persistent, especially for active funds. We also report that herding tends to increase after periods of high market volatility, and decrease with sentiment....

We study the information content of the mutual-fund investor mix at the fund level. Building on the fund-flow determinant literature, we develop a method to attribute the proportion of fund net-in-flow explained by a fund's fundamental characteristics and past performance as smart and dumb money...

Classifying mandatory 13F stockholding filings by manager type reveals that hedge fund strategies are mostly contrarian, while mutual fund strategies are largely trend following. The only institutional performers---the 2/3 of hedge fund managers that are contrarian---earn alpha of 2.4% per year....

We link a seemingly biased trading behavior to equilibrium asset prices. U.S. equity mutual fund managers tend to sell both their big winners and big losers. This selling pressure pushes down current prices and leads to higher future returns; aggregating across funds, we nd that securities for...

This paper examines the relation between idiosyncratic risk and mutual fund performance using asset pricing models. We use a unique data set containing monthly returns of 949 UK equity mutual funds over a 28-year period to measure fund performance. We find that idiosyncratic risk cannot be...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent mutual fund managers, as an important and representative group of professional investors, are prone to overconfidence and associated behavioural biases such as self-serving attribution. More importantly, we explore how these...

This paper examines performance of 95 actively managed U.S. sector equity mutual funds from 29 fund families relative to their peer exchange-traded funds, SPDR sector ETFs, in the period of 2008 to 2017. Our results do not show considerable evidence that actively managed sector mutual funds...