Oregon's Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) is a rich setting in which to study the effect of pension design on employer costs and employee retirement-timing decisions. PERS pays retirees the maximum benefit calculated using three formulas that can be characterized as defined benefit...

The answer depends on how broker clients would have invested in the absence of broker recommendations. To identify counterfactual retirement portfolios, we exploit time-series variation in access to brokers by new plan participants. When brokers are available, they are chosen by new participants...

Within the Oregon University System's defined contribution retirement plan, one investment provider offers access to face-to-face financial advice through its network of brokers. We find that younger, less highly educated, and less highly paid employees are more likely to choose this provider....

The answer depends on how broker clients would have invested in the absence of broker recommendations. To identify counterfactual retirement portfolios, we exploit time-series variation in access to brokers by new plan participants. When brokers are available, they are chosen by new participants...

The level of diseconomies of scale in asset management has important implications for tests of manager skill and the expected level of performance persistence. To identify the causal impact of fund size on future returns, we exploit the fact that small differences in returns can cause discrete...

Using novel data establishing hedge fund families, we show that changes in overlapping hedge fund family positions predict abnormal returns in U.S. stocks. A long-short portfolio of unanimous family entries and exits in overlapping positions earns an annualized alpha of 7.32%. Panel regressions...

Between 1993 and 2004, the share of mutual funds disclosing manager names to their investors fell significantly. We argue that the choice between named and anonymous management reflects a tradeoff between the marketing benefits of naming managers and the costs associated with their increased...

The independence of editorial content from advertisers' influence is a cornerstone of journalistic ethics. We test whether this independence is observed in practice. We find that mutual fund recommendations are correlated with past advertising in three personal finance publications but not in...

Combining data on explicit brokerage commissions that mutual fund families paid for trade execution between 1996 and 1999 with data on mutual fund holdings of initial public offerings (IPOs), I document a robust positive correlation between commissions paid to lead underwriters and reported...

We infer Moody's preference for accurate versus biased ratings using hand-collected data on the internal labor market outcomes of its analysts. We find that accurate analysts are more likely to be promoted and less likely to depart. The opposite is true for analysts who downgrade more...