I document portfolio pumping at the fund family level, a strategy that non-star fund managers buy stocks held by star funds in the family to inflate their performance at the quarter end. Families that heavily employ the strategy show strong evidence of inflated performance after 2002, when the...

In this paper, we consider for the first time the impact of fund regulation on the international distribution of investment funds. We study the 2001 UCITS Directive of the European Union, which was put in place to mitigate fraud and promote investor confidence throughout Europe. We examine the...

Mutual funds stand ready at all times to sell and redeem common stock to the investing public for the net value of their assets under management. In the language of transaction cost economics, they are open-access common pools subject to virtually free investor entry and exit. The Investment...

Regulations treating in a diversified way different types of funded positions introduced over decades, do not take into consideration the increasing opportunities of financial innovation and regulatory arbitrage. These opportunities seem to significantly benefit the most sophisticated market...

The regulation of mutual funds in the United States arguably contains the world's most extensive system of fiduciary protection, buttressed by elaborate liability rules and a host of procedural protections and mandatory disclosure requirements designed to facilitate investor protection and...

Building on the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in Jones v. Harris Associates, this paper presents the first comprehensive empirical study of mutual fund excessive fee liability under section 36(b) of the Investment Company Act. We use a hand-collected dataset of all excessive fee...

The objective of this paper is to present and discuss the new French requirements related to socially responsible investment (SRI), and provide reflections on the potential and limits of regulating SRI. We summarize the consequences of new Monetary and Financial Code Article L. 533-22-1 and the...

This paper estimates mutual funds’ preferences for governance structures, using data on proxy vote records. I elicit funds’ revealed preferences by studying the differences in their votes on the same issue across their portfolio firms’ shareholder proposals, and develop funds’ preference...

Scholars have roundly criticized disclosure as a regulatory regime over the past decade for good reason. Disclosures—whether describing the terms of a loan or the risks of investing—purport to inform consumers. But who actually reads disclosures? We argue that mutual fund disclosures are...

Since the 2008 financial crisis, in which the Reserve Primary Fund "broke the buck," money market funds (MMFs) have been the subject of ongoing policy debate. Many commentators view MMFs as a key contributor to the crisis because widespread redemption demands during the days following the Lehman...