This thesis consists of three essays on the interaction of investor clienteles and mutual fund behavior. The first essay (Cici, Kempf, and Sorhage 2015, Do Financial Advisors Provide Tangible Benefits for Investors? Evidence from Tax-Motivated Mutual Fund Flowsʺ) adds to the literature on fund...

Using a large sample of institutional investors' investments in private equity funds raised between 1991 and 2011, we estimate the extent to which investors' skill affects their returns. Bootstrap analyses show that the variance of actual performance is higher than would be expected by chance,...