This paper develops a simple technique that properly controls for “false discoveries,” or mutual funds that exhibit significant alphas by luck alone, to evaluate the performance of actively managed U.S. domestic-equity mutual funds during the 1975 to 2006 period. Our approach precisely...

Since the creation of the Chilean pension fund industry in 1981, pension fund administrators have not been free to choose their investment portfolios because of stringent regulation of investment limits. The diagnosis implicit with the imposition of limits was that the Chilean capital market was...

The contemporary social-economic conditions set pension-insurance companies, operating on the market of financial services against the serious challenge to compete with already confirmed financial institutions offering similar products with a definite saving element, as well as with each other...

This paper estimates transition matrices for the ratings on …nancial insti-tutions, using an unusually informative data set. We show that the processof rating migration exhibits signi…cant non-Markovian behavior, in the sensethat the transition intensities are a¤ected by macroeconomic and...

This paper estimates transition matrices for the ratings on financial insti-tutions, using an unusually informative data set. We show that the process of rating migration exhibits significant non-Markovian behavior, in the sense that the transition intensities are affected by macroeconomic and...

In June 1997, the Nasdaq stock market and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) each lowered its minimum price increment on most stocks from eighths to sixteenths. Like other researchers investigating similar events, we find that quoted spreads and effective spreads decline on both markets with the...

Because sell-side analysts are dependent on institutional investors for performance ratings and trading commissions, we argue that analysts are less likely to succumb to investment banking or brokerage pressure in stocks highly visible to institutional investors. Examining a comprehensive sample...

We examine a simple measure of portfolio performance based on prospect theory, which captures not only risk and return but also reflects differential aversion to upside and downside risk. The measure we propose is a ratio of gains to losses, with the gains and losses weighted (if desired) to...

Portfolio theory must address the fact that, in reality, portfolio managers are evaluated relative to a benchmark, and therefore adopt risk management practices to account for the benchmark performance. We capture this risk management consideration by allowing a prespecified shortfall from a...

This paper re-examines the incentives of mutual fund managers arising from investor flows. We provide evidence that the convexity of the flow-performance relationship varies with economic activity. We show that the effect is economically large and is not driven by abnormal years. We test two...