We examine how investment advisors guide the decision-making process of mutual fund investors by comparing the flow-performance sensitivity of no-load funds and the three main classes of load fund shares, conditional on the state of the market. We show that load investors are more sensitive to...

We conduct a volatility decomposition to identify the source of performance differences between low volatility and high volatility mutual funds. Higher return covariances between fund holdings is associated with more fund-level exposure to the idiosyncratic volatility effect. The average...

Our study examines mutual fund demand for a newly designed security, exchange-traded notes (ETNs). We find strong evidence that mutual fund long positions in ETNs significantly underperform and that the motivations to hold ETNs lie outside of maximizing returns. Mutual funds hold ETNs to hedge...

We examine whether sensitivities to cash flow (CF) and discount rate (DR) risk in down markets provide an explanation for the investment effect, where low-investment stocks earn higher expected returns than high-investment stocks. We show how productivity and financing constraints asymmetrically...