Mutual fund companies routinely advertise the past returns of their strong-performing, actively-managed equity funds. These performance advertisements imply that the advertised high past returns are likely to continue. Indeed, investors flock to these funds despite high past returns being a poor...

Mutual fund companies selectively advertise their better performing funds. However, investors respond to advertised performance data as if those data were unselected (i.e., representative of the population). We identify the failure to discount selected or potentially selected data as selection...

The Supreme Court's recent decision in Jones v. Harris Associates L.P. has highlighted the potential for agency conflicts in mutual funds, whose advisors have the de facto power to award themselves high fees. While the surrounding debate has focused on the extent to which market competition...

The AIFMD provides a harmonized European framework for regulating alternative investment funds. Prior to discussing its details, this chapter introduces to the AIFMD, discussing the developments that led to its adoption (Part 1), the AIFMD's principal objectives (Part 2) and its key tools for...

This article examines the post-financial crisis trends in the private equity industry. Although most research has followed the pre-crisis trends, we show that investors are demanding the inclusion of more investor-favorable compensation terms in limited partnership agreements. Our findings...

We examine the role of institutional investors in corporate governance in an environment where ownership is concentrated. The presence of dominant shareholders alters the role of institutional investors by limiting their voting influence; by shifting the focus from shareholder-manager conflicts...

As interest in art as an alternative asset class has grown in recent years so has the emergence of art investment vehicles. These vehicles seek to capitalize on the inherent inefficiencies of the art market and provide the potential to identify, create and execute transactions in works of art at...

This chapter for an upcoming handbook on mutual funds (by Edward Elgar Publishing) offers an overview of the mutual fund market and the investors who inhabit it. On the supply side, mutual funds hold $16 trillion in financial assets and have become the largest component of our private retirement...

This paper analyzes the economics of the private equity fund compensation. We build a novel model to estimate the expected revenue to fund managers as a function of their investor contracts. In particular, we evaluate the present value of the fair-value test (FVT) carried interest scheme, which...