This paper investigates politically connected firms in Germany. With the introduction of a new transparency law in 2007, information on additional income sources for all members of the German parliament became publicly available. We find that members of the conservative party (CDU/CSU) and the...

We investigate hedge fund firms' unobserved performance (UP), measured as the risk-adjusted return difference between a fund firm's reported return and hypothetical portfolio return derived from its disclosed long equity holdings. Fund firms with high UP outperform those with low UP by 7.2% p.a....

Rapid Trading, d.h. der kurzfristige Kauf und Verkauf von Fondsanteilen durch Fondsinvestoren, steht im Widerspruch zur Fondskonzeption, wonach Fonds Instrumente zum langfristigen Vermögensaufbau darstellen, und kann zu negativen Auswirkungen auf die Performance führen. Wir verwenden Daten...

This paper provides the first empirical test of the diversification of opinions theory and the group shift theory using real business data. Our data set covers management teams and single managers of US equity mutual funds. Our results reject the group shift theory and support the...

We examine the extent of the Status Quo Bias (SQB) in a real-world repeated decision situation. Individuals who are subject to a SQB tend to choose an alternative that was chosen previously (i.e. their status quo), even if it is not the optimal choice any more. We examine the US equity mutual...

This paper examines the influence of the position of a fund within its family on its subsequent net-inflows. Our empirical study of the US equity mutual fund market shows that reaching a top position within the family leads to large inflows. These inflows accrue beyond those expected, given the...

Due to a lack of data availability, numerous empirical studies on mutual fund flows (e.g. Sirri/Tufano (1998)) analyze synthetically derived flow measures. We show how good these measures can explain actual flows. We compare the measures suggested in the literature with the actual net-flows of...

This paper shows that gender differences exist in a professional setting where man-agers have a similar educational background and work experience. Using data from the U.S. mutual fund industry we find that female managers are more risk averse, follow less extreme and more consistent investment...

We examine the influence on managerial risk taking of incentives due to employment risk and due to compensation. Our empirical investigation of the risk taking behavior of mutual fund managers indicates that managerial risk taking crucially depends on the relative importance of these incentives....