This paper is the first to relate the investment practices of U.S. equity mutual funds to their management of flow risk, defined as the adverse effect of investor in- and outflows on fund performance. Using a comprehensive merged sample of 2,585 actively managed U.S. domestic equity funds from...

We are the first to analyze bond mutual funds' permission and use of complex investment practices like derivatives, restricted securities and securities lending. Based on unique regulatory information from the SEC's N-SAR filings, we show that most complex investments do not affect fund...

This is the first paper analyzing the impact of index momentum factors on the performance of international and global equity funds. Extending an international, index-based version of the Fama and French (1993) three-factor model by adding the factors of country momentum and sector momentum, we...

Performance regressions lever expected benchmark returns linearly to the risk exposures of the fund. The interest rate (IR) risk premium, however, usually follows a decreasingly upward-sloping yield curve, characterizing the nonlinearity between expected return and IR risk exposure, e.g....

In their seminal paper on bond fund performance, Blake, Elton and Gruber (1993) state that survivorship bias is unimportant for this market segment. Many bond fund studies have since been published without treating survivorship bias despite the dramatic changes in the market over the last 20...