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...

Despite extensive disclosure requirements, mutual fund investors do not observe all actions of fund managers. We estimate the impact of unobserved actions on fund returns using the return gap - the difference between the reported fund return and the return on a portfolio that invests in the...

Despite extensive disclosure requirements, mutual fund investors do not observe all actions of fund managers. We estimate the impact of unobserved actions on fund returns using the return gap-the difference between the reported fund return and the return on a portfolio that invests in the...

Basic economic principles suggest that a well-known trading strategy offers little economic profit. In this paper, we investigate whether skilled hedge fund managers are more likely to pursue unique investment strategies that result in superior performance. We propose a measure of the...

In the 1990s, many load funds introduced additional share classes that give investors the choice of paying back-end loads and/or annual fees instead of front-end loads. The transition to a multiple-class structure provides a well-controlled setting for research with regard to investor clienteles...

We argue that the purchase decisions of mutual fund investors are influenced by salient, attention-grabbing information. Investors are more sensitive to salient in-your-face fees, like front-end loads and commissions, than operating expenses; they are likely to buy funds that attract their...

In this study, we explore the dynamics of the relation between institutional trading and stock returns. We find that stock returns Granger-cause institutional trading (especially purchases) on a quarterly basis. The robust and significant causality from equity returns to institutional trading...

Does the mutual fund industry lose its best managers to hedge funds? We find that mutual funds are able to retain managers with good performance in the face of competition from a growing hedge fund industry. On the other hand, poor performers are more likely to leave the mutual fund industry. A...

Planar Maximally Filtered Graphs (PMFG) are an important tool for filtering the most relevant information from correlation based networks such as stock market networks. One of the main characteristics of a PMFG is the number of its 3- and 4-cliques. Recently in a few high impact papers it was...

The premium pricing process and the reserve stability under uncertainty are very challenging issues in the insurance industry. In practice, a premium which is sufficient enough to cover the expected claims and to keep stable the derived reserves is always required. This paper proposes a premium...