The consensus wisdom of active mutual fund managers, as reflected in their average over- and underweighting decisions, contains valuable information about future stock returns. Analyzing a comprehensive sample of active U.S. equity funds 1984-2008, we find that stocks heavily overweighted by...

We analyze the implications of linking the compensation of fund managers to the return of their portfolio relative to that of a benchmark - a common solution to the agency problem in delegated portfolio management. In the presence of such relative-performance-based objectives, investors have...

Purpose: Retail investors use information provided by mutual fund rating agencies to make investment decisions. This paper examines whether the ratings provide useful information to retail investors by analyzing the rating migration and closure risk of mutual funds that received Morningstar's...

We examine the information content of Australian credit rating announcements by measuring the abnormal changes in credit default swap (CDS) spreads. CDS spreads provide a direct view of credit quality and thus should impound information quickly when investors receive new credit risk-related...

We investigate the governance structure and practices of Australian corporate superannuation funds and explore the link between a fund's governance, fees and performance. Overall, it appears that the funds have governance structures that are prone to agency conflicts, lack of transparency and...

This study provides the first long-run analysis of the skill of active Australian equity fund managers based on trades inferred from a market-wide database of monthly portfolio holdings over the period 1994-2009. In addition to confirming previous findings that skill exists amongst active...

This study proposes methodological adjustments to the widely adopted performance benchmarking methodology of Daniel et al. (1997) as a means of improving the precision of alpha measurement for active equity fund managers. We achieve this by considering the monthly updating of characteristic...