This paper provides a new explanation for why closed-end bond funds coexist along with otherwise identical open-end bond funds. Closed-end bond funds offer investors the opportunity to leverage their fixed income investment at very low borrowing rates and are attractive to investors for this...

Defined contribution plans, predominantly 401(k)s, are the primary source of personal retirement savings for American workers, making the investment decisions within these accounts a salient policy concern. These decisions are a result of two separate actions: the mutual fund options selected by...

In this paper, the authors use monthly holdings to study timing ability. These data differ from holdings data used in previous studies in that the authors' data have a higher frequency and include a full range of securities, not just traded equities. Using a one-index model, the authors find, as...

A great deal of the literature in financial economics contains the assumption that returns are a linear function of a set of observable factors. The specification of the variables in the linear process (known as the return-generating process) is one of the key issues in finance today. The...

Almost all research on the movement of stock prices on ex-dividend days has found that prices decline by less than the dividend. Though this is consistent with tax effects, several papers have argued that this phenomenon could be caused by market microstructure effects. In this paper we make use...

This paper examines the effect of incentive fees on the behavior of mutual fund managers. Funds with incentive fees exhibit positive stock selection ability, but a beta less than one results in funds not earning positive fees. From an investor's perspective, positive alphas plus lower expense...

A number of articles in financial economics have used quarterly or semi-annual mutual fund holdings data to test hypotheses about investment manager behavior. This article reexamines four well-known hypotheses in finance to determine whether the results of prior tests of these hypotheses remain...