With detailed product- and firm-level data for mutual funds, we study why mutual fund families relinquish control of fund management (advising) and outsource to non-affiliated entities and why those entities agree to manage for the fund family. Fund families and fund advisors cannot write...

We examine team diversity and performance using the asset management industry as a laboratory. Employing political affiliation as a proxy, we find ideologically diverse teams perform better than homogeneous teams. The mechanism involves both improved decision-making due to more diverse...

We examine the role of peer (e.g., Lipper indices) vs. pure (i.e., market indices) benchmarks in the compensation contract of mutual fund managers. We first model the impact of peer vs. pure benchmarks on fund manager incentives. Then, using a unique hand-collected dataset, we test the...

Using manager compensation disclosure and intra-family manager cooperation measures, we create indices of family-level competitive/cooperative incentives. Families that encourage cooperation among their managers are more likely to engage in coordinated behavior (e.g., cross-trading,...

Studies examine the relation between mutual fund performance and trading cost using a variety of proxies - the most common being portfolio turnover. Overall, the evidence is consistent with informational equilibrium, i.e., trading has zero net impact on performance. We offer an alternative...

We examine the selection of fund self-declared benchmarks. While the incidence of style mismatched benchmarks is high at the beginning of our sample (41% of fund assets/34% of funds), it declines significantly over time. This decline is driven primarily by existing funds changing their...