This study provides early evidence on the performance of passively-managed hedged exchange-traded funds (HETFs) introduced rather recently in late 2006. The data covers surviving HETFs in 2017 under global macro and long-short classifications. Using Fung and Hsieh's (2004) 7-factor model and...

This paper investigates the effects of the Bank of Japan ETFs’ purchase program on private investments. In 2011, the Bank of Japan started a massive purchase program of ETFs that continuously grew in the following years, resulting in a sharp increase in ETFs’ domestic market. Analysing this...

Using the unique dataset on web analytics and exploiting institutional features of search engine technology, I study the relationship between an ETF’s visibility on the Internet and its fund flows. I consider three channels of online visibility: Organic or “free” search, paid search, and...

Corporate America today is astonishingly beholden to three large financial institutions: BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Global Advisors. As investors have moved their money into low cost, highly-diversified investment vehicles known as index funds, the so-called “Big Three”...

We study the interaction between ETF rebalancing and hedge fund “front-running” trades and its implications for the capital market. First, we document that ETF rebalancing has a strong negative relation with future stock returns. Second, we observe that hedge funds gradually increase...

New ETF creation has surged in recent years, giving investors the option to choose from a wide range of similar ETFs within each group of competitors. We identify groups of ETFs that can be considered direct competitors and examine the impact of competition on their market quality. Results show...

We examine the effects of equity ownership by exchange traded funds (ETFs) on corporate cash holdings. We find that firms increase their cash holdings in response to higher anticipated risks generated by ETFs. To establish a causal interpretation, we use the Russell 1000/2000 index...

We evaluate the performance of fixed income Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). We find that Treasury ETFs are indeed able to track their benchmarks, but that Investment Grade corporate bond ETFs underperform their benchmarks and High Yield corporate bond ETFs even severely underperform their...

This paper compares returns of ETFs holding physical commodities and ETFs holding derivative products to their respective spot commodity returns to identify significant performance differences based on the ETF assets. We regress ETF returns on spot commodity returns to estimate beta and R2...

We analyze trading strategies involving triple-leveraged and inverse triple-leveraged ETF pairs by simulating daily returns over a 48 year period. Our results show that many such strategies significantly outperform the S&P 500 on a risk-adjusted basis. The Sharpe ratio appears to be maximized...