Fund companies regularly send shareholder letters to their investors. We use textual analysis to investigate whether these letters' writing style influences fund flows and whether it predicts performance and investment styles. Fund investors react to the tone and content of shareholder letters:...

We study the role of liquidity management tools (LMTs) in mitigating financial fragility in investment funds during the COVID-19 market distress. We employ a unique dataset that reports the availability of different types of LMTs in a sample of Irish-domiciled corporate bond funds. We find that...

This paper investigates how covenants, intrinsic to Collateralized Loan Obligation (CLO) indentures, may amplify idiosyncratic shocks, imposing negative externalities on unrelated firms in CLO portfolios. Following a negative shock to the oil & gas industry, CLOs with exposure to oil and gas...

Equity funding is a widespread financing form that often accompanies the life cycle of innovative ventures from initial stages until maturity. From the perspective of investors, the event defining the success of an equity financing operation is the exit, which represents the moment when they...

This paper examines the causes and consequences of hedge fund investments in exchange traded funds (ETFs) using U.S. data from 1998 to 2018. The data indicate that transient hedge funds and quasi-indexer hedge funds are substantially more likely to invest in ETFs. Unexpected hedge fund inflows...

This paper examines the performance of 538 sovereign wealth fund (SWF) investments into venture capital, private equity, and real asset funds ("alternative asset funds") from 52 countries around the world over the years 1995-2020. The data indicate SWFs are significantly slower to fully...

The discount control mechanisms that closed-end funds often choose to adopt before IPO are supposedly implemented to narrow the difference between share price and net asset value, We find evidence that non-discretionary discount control mechanisms such as mandatory continuation votes serve as...

We exploit variation in the ancestries of U.S. equity mutual fund managers to show that ancestry affects portfolio decisions. Controlling for fund firm location, we find that funds overweight stocks from their managers’ ancestral home countries in their non-U.S. portfolio by 132 bps or 20.34%...

This paper develops a framework for the short-term modelling of market risk and shock propagation in the investment funds sector, including bi-layer contagion effects through funds' cross-holdings and overlapping exposures. Our work tackles in particular climate risk, with a first-of-its-kind...

In this paper, we first document the growing importance of foreign-domiciled investment funds in countries' portfolio liabilities over time and then show empirical evidence that cross-border fund flows are coincident with asset price movements. To measure the external liabilities of countries to...

With an ever-increasing amount of information related to the stock market or various investment avenues, misperception or no perception regarding mutual funds is becoming a norm for investors and marketers. To date no perception measuring scale has been developed for mutual fund investors, to...

We conduct a volatility decomposition to identify the source of performance differences between low volatility and high volatility mutual funds. Higher return covariances between fund holdings is associated with more fund-level exposure to the idiosyncratic volatility effect. The average...

I investigate whether and how private equity fund managers (GPs) inflate their interim fund valuations (net asset values, or NAVs) during fundraising periods. Specifically, I study the extent to which the GPs inflate NAVs by managing valuation assumptions (e.g., valuation multiples), influencing...

This study compares the risk-adjusted return of conventional- and ESG- ETFs during the Russia-Ukraine war. In the period following the breakout of the war, ESG ETFs have underperformed conventional ETFs in the US and other developed markets. However, both ETFs perform similarly in the...

Mutual funds play a prominent role in mobilising money from multiple investors and invests the collected corpus in shares of listed companies, government bonds, corporate bonds, short-term money-market instruments, other securities or assets, or a combination of these investments. Mutual fund...

This paper examines how the rise of passive investing affects active management. I develop a parsimonious model of passive and active investment in which greater passive investment accelerates investors' learning about active managers' skill. The model provides a rational explanation, namely the...

We study whether mutual fund managers gain an edge through thematic investment strategies—investing in stocks that may benefit from a particular theme. We use textual analysis of 10-K filings to identify stocks exposed to different semantic themes and measure a mutual fund’s thematic...

Using the unique dataset on web analytics and exploiting institutional features of search engine technology, I study the relationship between an ETF’s visibility on the Internet and its fund flows. I consider three channels of online visibility: Organic or “free” search, paid search, and...

Applying previous theoretical predictions on herding and market signals, we examine mutual fund herding from a perspective of anticipated risks and risk shocks. Funds herd when expecting risk but scatter as risk strikes surprisingly. We measure fund herding using cosine similarity of...

The article analyzes the literature and provides an assessment of the development of the stock market in the Russian Federation between 2016-2020. Today, the process of improving electronic technologies for carrying out operations in the stock market is also a continuing segment of the financial...

This paper aims to contribute to the lack of research on the learning process of mutual fund markets. The empirical design is focused on the ability of the Spanish equity mutual fund industry to learn from its important errors. The choice of this industry is justified by both its relevance in...

We exploit the staggered introduction of index funds in different segments and countries to study how increased competition from indexing affects the performance-flow relation and incentives of actively managed equity mutual funds. An increase in the market shares of available country-level...

This study aims to measure the impact of an intervention, the Community Investment Fund (CIF), on the socio-economic life of rural women. CIF is a community-managed fund aimed at improving the living standards of women by empowering them to undertake income-generating projects to become...

This article examines the implementation and effectiveness of the European structural and investment funds with regard to regional governance. The study uses the example of development processes in two border regions in Bavaria, the district of Cham on the Bavarian-Czech border and the district...

The investment fund sector has expanded dramatically since the crisis of 2008-2009. As the sector grows, so do the implications of its risk-taking for the wider financial system and real economy. This paper provides empirical evidence for the existence of widespread risk-taking incentives in the...

We examine the determinants of venture capital fundraising in the U.S. over the past twenty-five years. We study industry aggregate, state-level, and firm-specific fundraising to determine if macroeconomic, regulatory, or performance factors affect venture capital activity. We find that shifts...

We study the effects of U.S. monetary policy on international mutual fund investment. We apply a novel variant of the shock identification procedure in Bu et al (2021) to decompose observed U.S. monetary policy surprises into pure monetary policy shock and information news shock components. An...

Mutual funds’ switches to monthly holding disclosures reduce the efficiency of corporate investments. Consistent with a crowding-out mechanism, the evidence suggests that monthly portfolio disclosures discourage information production activities by other market participants and, consequently,...