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:...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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%...

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...

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...

Loan funds are open-end mutual funds holding predominantly corporate leveraged loans. We document empirically that loan funds are significantly more susceptible to run risk than any other category of debt funds, including corporate bond funds. Most importantly, we establish a link between loan...

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 research aimed to check whether investment fund managers maintain costs similarly from period to period. The research verified the hypothesis that managers maintain costs in the subsequent periods at a similar level. The study used a method based on contingency tables which are used to...

A lack of timely financing for purchases of vaccines and other health products impeded the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on analysis of contract signature and delivery dates in COVID-19 vaccine advance purchase agreements, this paper finds that 60-75 percent of the delay in...

Liquidity is important for the stability of financial markets and the growth of national economies. However, the liquidity of financial markets may be influenced by country risk shocks through informational asymmetry, funding constraints, and portfolio rebalancing activities. Therefore, the...

The funding ratio is a financial indicator to measure the viability of pension funds. The paper analyzes how Swiss occupational pension funds' technical discount rate and asset allocation are related to the funding ratio. The paper shows that funds with weaker funding ratios apply higher rates...

We provide the first quantitative survey of the empirical literature on hedge fund per- formance. We examine the impact of potential biases on the reported results. Empirical analysis in prior studies has been plagued by fragmentation of underlying data and by lim- ited consensus on how hedge...

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 wide- spread risk-taking incentives in...

This study investigates the impact of flows between bond and equity funds on investment factors over the period 1984-2015. It determines contemporaneous mispricing effects and a statistical reversal relation between these flows and both legs of the investment factor. The statistical reversal...

In the United States, exchange-traded funds can defer capital gains taxes of their investors by taking advantage of a legal loophole. To quantify the impact of this tax loophole on investor portfolios, we study a rank-dependent expected utility model. We develop an approximation formula for the...

This paper studies the difference between startup investments by private equity funds (buyout funds; PE) and venture capital funds (VC). PEs, which have traditionally invested in mature companies, have been increasingly investing in later-stage startups in recent years. Based on Crunchbase's...

We investigate the heterogeneous effects of financial literacy on individual investment decisions during and after the 2008 financial crisis. While differentiating objective and subjective financial knowledge, we find that only subjective knowledge is positively related to participation in...

In this paper we analyze how different types of venture capital investments - private, public and indirect public - affect performance of portfolio companies. We use data on more than 20,000 VC deals in Europe between 2000 and 2018 and we hand collected a unique dataset on the institutional...

This paper compares the extent of common ownership in the US and the EU stock markets, with a particular focus on differences in the applicable ownership transparency requirements. Most empirical research on common ownership to date has focused on US issuers, largely relying on ownership data...

We simulate the future performance of the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global as a leading example of sovereign wealth funds intended both to preserve wealth and provide regular budget contributions. Withdrawals are limited to the fund’s expected real returns; however, deviations are...