The standard analysis of corporate governance is that shareholders vote in the ratios that firms choose, such as one-share-one-vote. But if the cost of unbundling and trading votes is sufficiently low, then shareholders choose the ratios. We document an active market for votes within the...

Until recently, all Canadian mutual funds were required to disclose all their individual trades, offering a unique and ideal opportunity to measure and analyze the cost and performance of mutual funds' trades. We find that active management delivers both cheaper trades and better subsequent...

Regulations allow market makers to short sell without borrowing stock, and the transactions of a major options market maker show that in most hard-to-borrow situations, it chooses not to borrow and instead fails to deliver stock to its buyers. Some of the value of failing passes through to...

Regulations allow market makers to short sell without borrowing stock, and the transactions of a major options market maker show that in most hard-to-borrow situations, it chooses not to borrow and instead fails to deliver stock to its buyers. A part of the value of failing passes through to...

Recent studies (e.g. Gruber (1996)) conclude that a subset of investors allocates away from funds with relatively worse prospects, and toward funds with better prospects. The implication for a given fund is that good prospects increase the density of performance-sensitive investors, and bad...

It is a widespread practice among mutual fund managers to voluntarily waive fees that they have a contractual right to claim. This fact is puzzling and changes how contractual fees should be interpreted by investors, regulators, and academic researchers. Notably, the effective fee charged may be...

The literature predicts that the average skill level and productivity are higher in larger cities. Prior studies use workers' wage or education differentials to indirectly link city size and output. This article relates city size and productivity directly, using performance data of U.S. equity...

This article documents various demographic factors which influence mutual fund turnover including managerial experience, location, education, and gender. On average, funds in financial centers trade more but this excess turnover declines with experience. While most extra trading is concentrated...

The economic significance of the tax on cross-border dividends depends on the limits to dividend arbitrage. In the case of Canadian payments to the U.S. we observe these limits exactly because we see the actual pricing of the dividend-arbitrage transactions. These transactions recover only some...

This paper takes a portfolio view of consumer credit. Default models (credit-risk scores) estimate the probability of default of individual loans. But to compute risk-adjusted returns, lenders also need to know the covariances of the returns on their loans with aggregate returns. Covariances are...