Many investors purchase mutual funds through intermediated channels, paying brokers or financial advisors for fund selection and advice. This article attempts to quantify the benefits that investors enjoy in exchange for the costs of these services. We study broker-sold and direct-sold funds...

The article reports on a study of U.S. consumers which found that the majority of respondents did not understand the concepts relating to compound interest, credit card fees, and debt. The study on debt literacy was conducted by the authors and the marketing research company TNS. The authors...

Five experts gathered recently to discuss the future of enterprise risk management: Kaplan, the Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School, who with his colleague David Norton developed the balanced scorecard; Mikes, an assistant professor at HBS who studies the evolution of risk...

We study mutual fund mergers between 1999 and 2001 to understand the role and effectiveness of fund boards. Some fund mergers—typically across-family mergers—benefit target shareholders but are costly to target fund directors. Such mergers are more likely when funds underperform and their...

This paper studies the mutual fund industry in 56 countries and examines where this financial innovation has flourished. The fund industry is larger in countries with stronger rules, laws, and regulations, and specifically where mutual fund investors’ rights are better protected. The industry...

Each corporate growth project is an option, in the sense that managers face choices--push ahead or pull back--along the way. Yet many companies hesitate to apply options theory to initiatives such as R&D and geographic expansion, partly because these "real" options are highly complex. In this...

In 1997, France Telecom went through a partial privatization. Using a database that tracks over 200,000 eligible participants, we analyze employees’ decisions whether to participate; how much to invest; and what stock alternatives to select. The results are broadly consistent with a...

In early 1997, Cephalon, Inc., a biotechnology firm, purchased 2.5 million capped call options on its own stock, with a potential value of as much as $45 million, in exchange for $9.8 million worth of its common shares. Cephalon's first major drug, Myotrophin, was under review by the U.S. Food...

In this article, we study a well-known real option: the opening and closing of mines. Using a new database that tracks the annual opening and closing decisions of 285 developed North American gold mines in the period 1988-1997, we find that the real options model is a useful descriptor of mines'...