We investigate why spreads on corporate bonds are so much larger than expected losses from default. Systematic factors make very little contribution to spreads, even if higher moments or downside effects are taken into account. Instead we find that sizes of spreads are strongly related to...

Dichev [2007. American Economic Review 97, 386-401], in an influential paper, examines the gap between the performance of major stock markets and the dollar-weighted performance of investors in these markets. He finds a significant gap of 1.3 percent per year for NYSE/AMEX and 1.5 percent...

We use a new data set to study the determinants of the performance of open--end actively managed equity mutual funds in 27 countries. We find that mutual funds underperform the market overall. The results show important differences in the determinants of fund performance in the USA and elsewhere...

We use a new dataset to study how mutual fund flows depend on past performance across 28 countries. We show that there are marked differences in the flow-performance relationship across countries, suggesting that US findings concerning its shape do not apply universally. We find that mutual fund...