I study the consequences of a random exposure to common risk for the purpose of relative performance evaluation (RPE) and find that it significantly affects the usefulness and the empirical measurement of RPE. According to my analysis, the magnitude of the exposure risk not only determines how...

Responding to the financial crisis of 2008, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (“Dodd-Frank Act”) to “provide for financial regulatory reform” and to “protect consumers and investors[.]” Section 951 of the Dodd-Frank Act (“Section 951”)...

Empirical research in finance has documented a strong positive and convex relationship between investment performance and flows in and out of managed portfolios such as mutual funds. It is also well-known that fee contracts for portfolio managers give the manager a fixed-fraction of assets under...

We develop a measurement-error framework for assessing the quality of relative-performance metrics designed to filter out the systematic component of performance, and analyze relative total shareholder return (rTSR)-the predominant metric market participants use to isolate managers'...

The paper proposes a model of delegated portfolio management in which career concerns lead to unprofitable trade by uninformed managers (i.e. churning). We find that churning does not necessarily reduce the return that a representative investor expects ex-ante from delegating trade to a manager....

Investment fund managers make asset allocation decisions on behalf of a significant segment of US households. To elucidate the incentives they operate under, as well as the income and career risks they face, we construct a unique and novel dataset, which encompasses detailed information on the...

We study incentive contracts in asset management business under dynamic actions and relationships between an investor, a partner of an investment company, and a fund manager of the company. The investor cannot perfectly observe the partner and manager’s actions, and similarly, the partner...

The optimal contracts in portfolio delegation under general preferences are characterized when the underlying state variable is not contractible, and the principal must rely on the final returns of portfolios to design the compensation schemes for the fund manager. We show that the optimal...