Return-chasing investors almost exclusively consider top-performing funds for their investment decisions. When drawing conclusions about the managerial skill of these top performers, they tend to neglect fund volatility and the cross-sectional information contained in the number of funds and the...

This study compares a measure of market-share changes with net flows to revisit the fund flow-performance relationship from the viewpoint of the heteroscedasticity of fund flows. We decompose market-share changes (net flows) into inflow and outflow shares and other parts (inflow and outflow) to...

I study the market for lending and borrowing securities in the United States. I find that by making securities available for borrowing, mutual funds acquire information about short selling, which they exploit for trading. Funds with discretion in their investment choices rebalance their...

Using the herding measures of Lakonishok, Shleifer and Vishny (1992) (LSV) and Frey, Herbst and Walter (2007) (FHW), we assess herding by French equity mutual funds between 1999 and 2005. We show that LSV herding amounts to 6.5% while FHW herding is about 2.5 times stronger. We observe that...

We develop a model of performance evaluation and fund flows for mutual funds in a family. Family performance has two effects on the estimate of a member fund's skill and its inflows: a positive common-skill effect, and a negative correlated-noise effect. The overall spillover is either positive...

We pursue the first large scale investigation of a strongly growing mutual fund type: Islamic funds. Based on an unexplored, survivorship bias adjusted dataset, we analyse the financial performance and investment style of 265 Islamic equity funds from twenty countries. As Islamic funds often...

I study the effect of mutual funds’ securities lending activities on their participation in proxy voting using hand-collected fund securities lending data. Consistent with Shleifer and Vishny’s (1986) argument that a shareholder’s willingness to monitor a firm decreases as the cost of...

Each year, the Investment Company Institute (ICI) conducts a telephone survey of US households to track households’ ownership of mutual funds and to gather information on their demographic and financial characteristics. The most recent survey was conducted from May to June 2022 and was fielded...

—“Skin in the game”—money managers’ private investments in the funds they run—helps aligning potentially conflicted interests of investors and managers. Prior research acknowledges this benefit but remains silent about how investors are supposed to learn if fund managers have skin in...

Each year, the Investment Company Institute (ICI) conducts a telephone survey of US households to track households’ ownership of mutual funds and to gather information on their demographic and financial characteristics. The most recent survey was conducted from May to June 2020 and was based...