This study documents a significant relation between changes in commodity prices and investors’ price sensitivity in the market for mutual funds. Specifically, price sensitivity⸺defined as the negative relation between fund-level flows and a fund’s cost of ownership⸺is more pronounced in...

This study shows that the representative investor's sophistication in the market for mutual funds is time-varying, and increases with the constraints on household disposable income at the aggregate level. Based on the fact that energy commodities are largely inelastic household expenditures that...