Each year, the Investment Company Institute (ICI) conducts a telephone survey of US households to track households’ ownership of mutual funds and to gather information on their demographic and financial characteristics. The most recent survey was conducted from May to June 2020 and was based...

I study the effect of mutual funds’ securities lending activities on their participation in proxy voting using hand-collected fund securities lending data. Consistent with Shleifer and Vishny’s (1986) argument that a shareholder’s willingness to monitor a firm decreases as the cost of...

We test whether 1) institutional investors with concentrated international holdings outperform internationally diversified investors, and 2) foreign investors with information advantage, measured by cultural and geographic proximity to the target market, outperform other foreign investors. Using...

This paper introduces a general continuous-time mathematical framework for solution of dynamic mean-variance control problems. We obtain theoretical results for two classes of functionals: the first one depends on the whole trajectory of the controlled process and the second one is based on its...

Using the herding measures of Lakonishok, Shleifer and Vishny (1992) (LSV) and Frey, Herbst and Walter (2007) (FHW), we assess herding by French equity mutual funds between 1999 and 2005. We show that LSV herding amounts to 6.5% while FHW herding is about 2.5 times stronger. We observe that...

Traditional portfolio theory predicts that investors' portfolios should be diversified across international markets. In contrast, empirical studies document that investors are more likely to invest in their home country and in foreign markets that are culturally similar to and geographically...

We survey institutional investors to understand why they integrate environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into their investment management processes. Using a unique data set, we find that limited partners (LPs) are motivated to incorporate ESG because they believe that ESG usage is...

We examine two forward-looking mutual fund ratings: the analyst rating produced by human analysts and the quantitative rating generated by a machine learning technique. The analyst rating identifies outperforming funds, while the quantitative rating fails to do so—this difference is mostly due...

We find that aggregate net equity fund flows are strongly negatively correlated with changes in expected future stock market volatility as measured by the VIX. Implying that investor purchase decisions are primarily driven by returns and sale decisions by risk perceptions, we further find that...

The paper presents the essence and ways of limiting the level of investment risk through the processes of diversifying the composition of investment portfolios. The paper shows types of deposit portfolios. The author analyzed the profitability of deposit portfolios with various share of...