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...

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...

Capacity constraints limit the profits of some investment strategies, while other strategies are more scalable. We develop a dollar-weighted return measure that parses the factor timing by investors and a strategy's capacity constraints. We find that actively managed funds exhibit significant...

This paper investigates the joint determination of two dimensions of a security: trading volume and return. In much of the existing literature, volume is modeled as being exogenously related to security returns. Our analysis evaluates the extent to which trading activity also depends on security...