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...

Prior studies have documented that pension plan sponsors rigorously monitor a fund's performance relative to a benchmark. We use a first-difference approach to show that in an effort to beat benchmarks, fund managers controlling large pension assets tend to increase their exposure to high-beta...