The independence of editorial content from advertisers' influence is a cornerstone of journalistic ethics. We test whether this independence is observed in practice. We find that mutual fund recommendations are correlated with past advertising in three personal finance publications but not in...

Although mutual funds exhibit little ability to persistently outperform their peers, money flows into funds with the highest past returns. Berk and Green (2004) rationalize these patterns by arguing that more-skilled managers manage more assets but, because of diseconomies of scale, generate the...

We use mutual fund recommendations to test whether editorial content is independent from advertisers’ influence in the financial media. We find that major personal finance magazines (Money, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, and SmartMoney) are more likely to recommend funds from families that...

Household demand for actuarially unfair insurance against small risks has long puzzled economists. One way to potentially rationalize this demand is to recognize that (non-life) insurance is an incentive-compatible means of engaging an expert buyer. To quantify the benefits of expert buying, we...

In markets for experience goods, publications exist to help consumers decide which products to purchase. However, in most cases these publications accept advertising from the very firms whose products they review, raising the possibility that they bias product reviews to favor advertisers. To...

Oregon's Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) is a rich setting in which to study the effect of pension design on employer costs and employee retirement-timing decisions. PERS pays retirees the maximum benefit calculated using three formulas that can be characterized as defined benefit...

We use administrative data from Oregon's Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) to study the effect of pension design on employer costs and employee retirement-timing decisions. During our 1990–2003 sample period, PERS calculates each member's retirement benefit using up to three different...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>To rationalize the well-known underperformance of the average actively managed mutual fund, we exploit the fact that retail funds in different market segments compete for different types of investors. Within the segment of funds marketed directly to retail investors, we show...</p>

Combining data on brokerage commissions that mutual fund families paid for trade execution between 1996 and 1999 with data on mutual fund holdings of initial public offerings (IPOs), I document a robust, positive correlation between commissions paid to lead underwriters and reported holdings of...