Rational investors should account for risk factor exposure when allocating capital to mutual funds. Two recent influential studies use mutual fund flows to test whether investors distinguish between performance driven by managers' skill and systematic risk factors. Both studies found that...

This chapter provides a perspective on the rapidly developing literature on investment performance evaluation. I use the stochastic discount factor approach to present and critique current performance measurement techniques in a unified setting. I offer a number of suggestions to improve...

Strategies that overweight low beta stocks and underweight high beta stocks earn positive alphas. Price noise is known to affect high beta stocks, hence, noise trading can be expected to significantly affect the performance of these strategies. I study the impact of flows between bond and equity...

Motivated by the observation that elderly liquidate their mutual fund holdings regularly, we examine whether mortality patterns have a predictable impact on aggregate mutual fund flows and asset prices. Our key conjecture is that periods with high mortality rates would be associated with higher...

By analyzing portfolio holdings, we find that a significant subset of Hedged Mutual Funds (HMFs) and smart-beta Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) tilt their portfolios towards well-known anomaly characteristics and that such tilts are highly persistent. Short positions of HMFs amplify their factor...

This paper examines the relation between idiosyncratic risk and mutual fund performance using asset pricing models. We use a unique data set containing monthly returns of 949 UK equity mutual funds over a 28-year period to measure fund performance. We find that idiosyncratic risk cannot be...

This study provides evidence for a positive association between mutual fund holdings’implied cost of capital (ICC) and future performance. Consistent with large transactioncosts of ICC-based investments impeding their exploitation and employing a ICC-basedstrategy reflecting skill,...

We investigate whether alternative asset classes should be included in optimal portfolios of the most prominent investor personae in the Behavioral Finance literature, namely, the Cumulative Prospect Theory, the Markowitz and the Loss Averse types of investors. We develop a stochastic spanning...

We study the equilibrium implications of a multi-asset economy in which asset managers are subject to different benchmarks, and demonstrate how heterogeneous benchmarking generates a mechanism through which fundamental shocks propagate across assets. Fluctuations in asset managers' capital...

Using mutual fund flow, we empirically test whether choices made by investors are consistent with preferences implied by prospect theory. Our findings support this hypothesis. When allocating capital to mutual funds, investors evaluate funds based on the past performance distribution and choose...