In a controlled field setting, in which the majority of people in our sample lose more than £90,000 ($120,000), we examine how human beings respond to major financial losses. University ethics boards would not allow this kind of huge-loss phenomenon to be studied with normal social-science...

Investment risk is addressed from the perspective of long-term investors, with key concepts being discussed and methods outlined for evaluating risk over long horizons. The main themes include: the need to focus on shortfall versus objectives and sources of sustained loss, rather than return...

Asset owners (principals) typically do not manage their own investments and leave this job to delegated managers (agents). What is best for the asset owner, however, is usually not best for the fund manager. Additional agency conflicts arise when the asset owner does not know the quality and...

Investment performance studies of pension or mutual funds have overall been too statistically inconclusive to create definitive rankings to help investors make fund selection decisions. This paper presents an alternative approach based on comparing the pension or mutual fund firms themselves...

This paper develops a tractable dynamic model of competition between two risk-averse portfolio managers who attempt to outperform each other by trading in different stocks, reflecting asset specialization. We characterize explicitly the unique Nash equilibrium portfolio policies, and show that a...

This paper investigates a fund manager's risk-taking incentives induced by an increasing and convex fund-flows to relative-performance relationship. In a dynamic portfolio choice framework, we show that the ensuing convexities in the manager's objective give rise to a finite risk-shifting range...

This paper investigates a fund manager's risk-taking incentives induced by an increasing and convex fund-flows to relative-performance relationship. In a dynamic portfolio choice framework, we show that the ensuing convexities in the manager's objective give rise to a finite risk-shifting range...

Money managers are rewarded for increasing the value of assets under management. This gives a manager an implicit incentive to exploit the well-documented positive fund-flows to relative-performance relationship by manipulating her risk exposure. The misaligned incentives create potentially...

Money managers are rewarded for increasing the value of assets under management, and predominantly so in the mutual fund industry. This gives the manager an implicit incentive to exploit the well-documented positive fund-flows to relative-performance relationship by manipulating her risk...

We provide a rationale for window dressing where investors respond to conflicting signals of managerial ability inferred from a fund's performance and its disclosed portfolio holdings. We contend that window dressers take a risky bet on their performance during a reporting delay period, which...