Within the Oregon University System's defined contribution retirement plan, one investment provider offers access to face-to-face financial advice through its network of brokers. We find that younger, less highly educated, and less highly paid employees are more likely to choose this provider....

This paper examines the determinants of cross-sectional variation in post-merger mutual fund performance. Mergers between funds with similar management objectives, as reflected by average portfolio book-to-market ratio, price-earnings ratio, beta and market capitalization values, outperform...

Defining systematic risk management (SRM) skill as persistently low fund systematic risk, we find evidence of time varying allocation of hedge fund management effort across the business cycle. In weak market states, skilled managers focus on minimization of systematic risk via dynamic...