We present a simple rational model to highlight the effect of investors' participation costs on the response of mutual fund flows to past fund performance. By incorporating participation costs into a model in which investors learn about managers' ability from past returns, we show that mutual...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>Participants in defined contribution (DC) retirement plans rarely adjust their portfolio allocations, suggesting that their investment choices and consequent money flows are sticky and not discerning. However, participants’ inertia could be offset by DC plan sponsors, who...</p>

We find that institutional ownership concentration is positively related to the pay-for-performance sensitivity of executive compensation and negatively related to the level of compensation, even after controlling for firm size, industry, investment opportunities, and performance. These results...

This paper provides direct evidence supporting the tax-loss selling hypothesis as an explanation of the January effect. Examining turn-of-the-year return and volume patterns for municipal bond closed-end funds, which are held mostly by tax-sensitive individual investors, we document a January...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>Can managers influence the liquidity of their firms’ shares? We use plausibly exogenous variation in the supply of public information to show that firms actively shape their information environments by voluntarily disclosing more information than regulations mandate and...</p>

We document widespread changes to the historical I/B/E/S analyst stock recommendations database. Across seven I/B/E/S downloads, obtained between 2000 and 2007, we find that between 6,580 (1.6%) and 97,582 (21.7%) of matched observations are different from one download to the next. The changes...

We examine whether irrational behavior among small (retail) investors drives post-IPO prices. We use prices from the grey market (the when-issued market that precedes European IPOs) to proxy for small investors' valuations. High grey market prices (indicating overoptimism) are a very good...