We study how investment fees vary within private-capital funds. Net-of-fee return clustering suggests that most funds have two tiers of fees, and we decompose differences across tiers into both management and performance-based fees. Managers of venture capital funds and those in high demand are...

We argue that bank holding companies (BHCs) extend shadow insurance to the prime institutionalmoney market funds (PI-MMFs) they sponsor and that PI-MMFs price this shadow insurance bycharging investors significantly higher expense ratios and paying lower net yields. We provide evidence that...

Controversies around commission-based financial advice led many policy makers worldwideto introduce commission caps. Are these regulations effective in reducing prices offinancial products and stimulating investment? I examine these questions in the contextof mutual fund market by estimating the...

In this paper, we argue that bank-sponsored prime institutional money market funds (PI-MMFs) are different from non-bank-sponsored PI-MMFs. This difference can arise because the sponsoring bank holding companies (BHCs) can extend shadow insurance to ailing affiliated MMFs. We hypothesize that...

We document large variation in net-of-fee performance across public pension funds investing in the same private equity fund. In aggregate, these differences imply that the pensions in our sample would have earned $44 billion more – equivalent to $8.50 more per $100 invested – had they each...

Marketing and distribution expenses are responsible for about a third of the cost of active management in the mutual fund industry. We develop and estimate a structural model of mutual fund marketing with learning about unobserved skill and costly investor search. Our estimates suggest that...