A closet indexer is more likely to meet a value-weighted investment benchmark by value-weighting the portfolio. Following this intuition, we introduce a simple measure of active management, the absolute difference between the value weights and the actual weights held by a fund, averaged across...

We show theoretically and empirically that no-arbitrage pricing magnifies the importance of noise when replication requires offsetting positions with similar fundamentals. This occurs because fundamentals are hedged, while any errors in the underlying asset prices are levered and amplified....

Ostensibly passive index funds and ETFs are surprisingly active. A third of these funds exhibit more activeness than the median actively managed fund, as measured by conventional proxies. Using hand-collected prospectus data, we find that "passive" funds offer an increasingly wide assortment of...

This paper explores the determinants of IPO prices and studies the relationship between price choice of firms going public and post-issue stock performance and firm characteristics. I find that IPO prices positively relate to median industry prices, underwriter reputation, and book-to-market...

This paper investigates the role of the family organization of the mutual fund industry in shaping managerial portfolio decisions and fund performance. Mutual fund managers who actively deviate from the "average" portfolio of other funds in the same fund family significantly outperform managers...

This paper shows that the gender and age of the wage-setter are crucial determinants of the disparity in wages between sexes. We document our findings using a dataset on compensation of corporate officers that is uniquely suited for this analysis because officer wages are set by chief executive...