The aggregate portfolio of Chinese actively managed stock mutual funds exhibits a large and significantly positive alpha. Results from bootstrap simulations indicate that most Chinese active stock mutual fund managers have skill. A substantial amount of their outperformance can be attributed to...

This paper studies hedge fund performance and confirms reports of an aggregate decline over the past decade. We test whether a comprehensive set of prediction models can select subsets of individual funds that buck the trend and subsequently outperform. Seven of the predictors reliably pick...

Using a sample of U.S. international equity mutual funds, we show that funds that hire sub-advisors abroad do not outperform. For example, funds that hire outsourced international sub-advisors underperform on a risk-adjusted basis by up to 126 bps annually, relative to funds that do not...

In 1994, Josef Lakonishok, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny published a landmark study investigating the performance of value stocks relative to glamour securities in the United States over a 26-year period. Their research concluded that value stocks tended to outperform glamour stocks by wide...

We construct investor sentiment indices for six major stock markets and decompose them into one global and six local indices. In a validation test, we find that relative sentiment is correlated with the relative prices of dual-listed companies. Global sentiment is a contrarian predictor of...

We exploit the merger between BlackRock and Barclays Global Investors to study how changes in expected ownership concentration affect the investment behavior of funds and the cross-section of stocks worldwide. We find that funds with open-end structures and a large exposure to commonly-held...

We show that Chinese actively managed stock mutual funds persistently exhibit a preference for growth stocks over value stocks, despite the fact that value stocks outperform growth stocks on average. Moreover, funds with a growth tilt do not under-perform their value-oriented peer funds. To...

Short selling exchange-traded funds (ETFs) has become a common means of speculating or hedging in response to pessimistic expectations about a specific market or sector, as the short interest of ETFs is more than 10 times that of individual stocks, on average. We determine that sector-based ETFs...

We study how mutual funds respond to ESG scandals of portfolio companies. We find that, after experiencing an ESG scandal in their portfolio, active mutual fund managers (but not passive ones) are more likely to vote in favor of ESG proposals compared to other funds without scandal exposure...