Marketing and distribution expenses are responsible for about a third of the cost of active management in the mutual fund industry. We develop and estimate a structural model of mutual fund marketing with learning about unobserved skill and costly investor search. Our estimates suggest that...

We show that a mutual fund's quot;stock selection skillquot; computed using the Daniel, Grinblatt, Titman and Wermers (1997) procedure can be decomposed into additional components that include impatient quot;informed tradingquot; and quot;liquidity provision,quot; thereby helping us understand...

This paper explores the relationship between the after-tax returns that taxable investors earn on equity mutual funds and the subsequent cash inflows to these funds. Previous studies have documented that funds with high pretax returns attract greater inflows. This paper investigates the relative...

We provide an introduction to the use of return based style analysis of Sharpe (1992) in practice. We demonstrate the importance of selecting the right style benchmarks and how the use of inappropriate style benchmarks may lead to wrong conclusions. When style analysis is applied to sector...

We present a comprehensive analysis of the performance and flows of U.S. actively-managed equity mutual funds during the COVID-19 crisis of 2020. We find that most active funds underperform passive benchmarks during the crisis, contradicting a popular hypothesis. Funds with high sustainability...

Investment taxes have a substantial impact on the performance of taxable mutual fund investors. Mutual funds can reduce the tax burdens of their shareholders by avoiding securities that are heavily taxed and by avoiding realizing capital gains that trigger higher tax burdens to the funds'...

Despite common wisdom that equities and bonds are segmented, the organization structure of fund families can offset frictions regarding cross-asset segmentation. We find that actively-managed equity funds and corporate bond funds linked within a mutual fund family exhibit a significant...

Mutual fund managers may decide to deviate from a well-diversified portfolio and concentrate their holdings in industries where they have informational advantages. In this paper, we study the relation between the industry concentration and the performance of actively managed U.S. mutual funds...

Our framework for evaluating and investing in mutual funds combines observed returns on funds and passive assets with prior beliefs that distinguish pricing-model inaccuracy from managerial skill. A fund's alpha' is defined using passive benchmarks. We show that returns on non-benchmark passive...

Investors holding mutual funds in taxable accounts face a classic externality. The after-tax return of their investment depends on the behavior of others. In particular, redemptions may force the mutual fund to sell some of its equity positions in order to pay off the liquidating investors. As a...