We investigate whether competition between the fund companies that offer mutual funds constrains individual fund fees. We document that over half of individual fund fee variation is explained by company-wide components. Moreover, we show using SEC prospectus download data that company-level...

Using the relationship between institutional trades and sequential public information, this study provides a systematic way to identify institutional trades that are informative about future equity returns. By studying the U.S. financial institutions from 1994 to 2016, I show that institutional...

We examine the relation between passive ownership and financial reporting quality measured by Beneish's (1999) earnings' manipulation score (M-score). We find that passive ownership is negatively related to M-score and to the likelihood of being designated as a “manipulator” firm. However,...

Institutional sponsors increasingly seek outside help in investment management by delegating manager selection and capital allocation decisions to external lead managers. Whether this enhances performance, however, is yet to be examined. We fill the gap using a unique dataset of Korean...

We study the transmission of financial news and opinions through social interactions. We identify a series of plausibly exogenous shocks, which cause “treated investors” to trade abnormally. We then trace the “contagion” of abnormal trading activity from the treated investors to their...

The capital structure arbitrage strategy exploits the discrepancies between the credit default swap and equity markets. It assumes that both markets instantaneously react to new information, so it fails to take into account the lead-lag relationships between the prices in the two markets and...

Alpha, or outperformance of a benchmark, can be generated in many ways within a portfolio. It can be created by picking the top hedge fund managers, or by capturing the illiquidity premium via alternative assets. Venture capital is a major source of alpha for long-term investors. Alpha can also...

Many financial instruments are designed with embedded leverage such as options and leveraged exchange traded funds (ETFs). Embedded leverage alleviates investors' leverage constraints and, therefore, we hypothesize that embedded leverage lowers required returns. Consistent with this hypothesis,...

Leveraged ETFs provide a convenient mechanism to dynamically change portfolio exposure and can be successfully used to construct robust portfolios that perform well during equity market drops. We start with a classical 60 percent Bonds/ 40 percent Stocks portfolio with monthly rebalancing that...

We discuss performance of some known market anomalies like equal-weighted index, low volatility stock index, factor anomalies of Andrea Frazzini, Ronen Israel and Tobias J. Moskowitz. We suggest the utilization of these anomalies through dynamic risk allocation in portfolios based on these...