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...

This article is on the hidden state interest that article 52(§1) of the Chinese Contract Law protects and the questionable applicability of freedom of contract to Chinese state-owned enterprises (hereafter “SOEs”). In common law, fraud and duress make a contract voidable. In Western civil...

Whenever a court enforces a bargain, it does so against someone who regrets having made it. Why should he be bound? Our thesis is that, in principle, a contract of exchange should be enforced when it is economically fair and voluntary. It is economically fair when the performance that each party...

We propose a novel high-frequency decomposition of daily stock returns into news- and non-news-driven components, and uncover evidence of pervasive stock market underreaction to firm news. Prices tend to drift in the same direction as the initial market response for several days after the news...

Investment in bond mutual funds has grown rapidly in recent years. With it, there is a growing concern that they are a new source of potential fragility. While there is a vast literature on flows in equity mutual funds, relatively little research has been done on bond mutual funds. In this...

We study the trading performance of actively-managed mutual funds from 16 domicile countries investing in 42 equity markets over the period 2001-2014. In the aggregate, funds achieve particularly poor returns in U.S. equity: after adjusting for style, the stocks they buy underperform those they...

In in re Trulia, Delaware Court of Chancery broke away from its tradition of routinely approving disclosure-only settlements and required disclosures to be material in order to cure the conflict of interest between plaintiff counsel and plaintiff class. I argue that fairness of settlement is the...

Pure economic loss has been a frontier tort law issue both in Europe and the United States. There are two rules to follow: one would exclude pure economic loss from recovery; the other would allow it. It totally depends on the jurisdiction one is in. However, the mystery is that one cannot...

This paper studies the role of mutual fund yield in driving investor flows and performance of bond funds. Using two common measures, the SEC yield and 12-month distribution yield, we find strong evidence that investors tend to chase bond funds with higher yields, even after controlling for total...

We show theoretically and empirically that flows into index funds raise the prices of large stocks in the index disproportionately more than the prices of small stocks. Conversely, flows predict a high future return of the small-minus-large index portfolio. This finding runs counter to the CAPM,...