Rationality suggests that advice-seeking investors receive benefits from financial advice that are comparable in value to the fees paid for such advice. However, empirical evidence documenting these benefits for U.S. investors has so far been lacking. We document that U.S. mutual fund investors...

We document that prior work experience of mutual fund managers outside of the asset management industry is valuable from an investment perspective in that it provides managers with a stock picking and industry timing advantage. Fund managers' stock picks from industries where they previously...

The performance of actively managed mutual funds is largely dependent upon the investment decisions of the responsible fund managers. However, little is known about the behavior of these managers. This survey study sheds light on the decision processes of German fund managers. The design of the...

We provide a rationale for window dressing where investors respond to conflicting signals of managerial ability inferred from a fund's performance and disclosed portfolio holdings. We contend that window dressers take a risky bet on their performance during a reporting delay period, which...

I investigate the consequences for mutual funds' operational outcomes when fund families focus their efforts on their core competency, i.e. portfolio management, by outsourcing noncore activities to external providers. Specifically, I find that funds of families that outsource shareholder...

We study a set of German open-end mutual funds for a time period during which this industry emerged from its infancy. In those years, the distribution channel for mutual funds was dominated by the brick-and-mortar retail networks of the large universal banks. Using monthly observations from...

This paper introduces two measures to investigate potential window-dressing behavior among mutual fund managers. We show that unskilled managers that perform poorly are more likely to window dress by strategically purchasing winner stocks and selling loser stocks near quarter ends. Further,...