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To best utilize labor, companies need to match employees' skills with jobs that best fit those skills. Exploiting unique features of the mutual fund industry, we identify instances when this matching happens for fund managers and study its consequences. After fund managers are matched, they improve their risk-adjusted performance significantly. Fund companies use this information to maximize company value by reallocating existing and directing new capital to their matched managers and by collecting higher fees from the matched managers' funds. In addition, they make the expertise of matched managers available to the other managers of the fund company. July 28, 2022

We introduce a new measure to assess the valuation skills of investment-grade corporate bond funds. Our measure recognizes funds that ex-ante hold a higher fraction of undervalued bonds as having better valuation skills. The measure predicts future fund performance, is stable over time, and is unrelated to other sources of skill. Fund investors recognize such skill by responding more to the past performance of funds with better valuation skills. Consistent with the equilibrium model of Gârleanu and Pedersen (2018), our evidence suggests that as growing capital gets allocated to skilled bond funds, the corporate bond market is becoming more efficient.

Firms’ competitive advantages are unsustainable when competitors poach their employees away to study and recreate those advantages. We document inter-firm knowledge spillovers through labor mobility in the mutual fund industry. About one quarter of the competitive advantage of the originating fund family spills over to the recipient family. These knowledge spillovers intensify when switching managers had better access to the organization processes of the originating family and frictions hampering knowledge absorption are weaker. Ease of knowledge integration, greater organizational similarity, and lower information barriers at the recipient family—acting as mitigants for the aforementioned frictions—also magnify these knowledge spillovers. January 31, 2019

This paper examines how labor mobility restrictions such as non-compete clauses in employment contracts affect the incentives and resulting behavior of employees. Using the investment industry as a testing laboratory, we find that mutual fund managers respond to heightened career concerns due to increased enforceability of non-compete clauses by increasing effort, reducing downside risk, engaging less in tournaments, making their portfolios similar to the portfolios of their benchmarks or peers, and increasing window-dressing. These concerns are, however, moderated by the presence of more developed internal labor markets, which allow managers to substitute restricted across-family mobility with within-family mobility.

We evaluate how different betas and characteristics related to default, term, and liquidity risk fare against one another in explaining the cross-section of corporate bond returns. We find that characteristics-credit rating, duration, and Amihud illiquidity measure-fare better. Yields add incremental explanatory power. Consistent with yields providing a timelier assessment of default risk than ratings, bonds with higher yields but similar credit ratings, durations and Amihud measures experience more subsequent ratings downgrades, fewer upgrades, and a higher frequency of defaults. Based on our findings, we present characteristic portfolios that can be used to benchmark individual bond and portfolio returns.

We hypothesize that connections with buy-side analysts provide a sell-side analyst with private information generated by the buy-side that enhances the quality of sell-side research. We proxy for these connections with the number of stocks at the intersection of stocks held in the portfolios of institutional investors and followed by the sell-side analyst. The larger this intersection, the more opportunities the sell-side analyst has to interact with institutional investors. We proxy for the research quality of the sell-side analyst with the relative accuracy of her earnings forecasts. We find that such connections enhance the accuracy of earnings forecasts, but up to a point of diminishing returns. Additional tests rule out that the observed association is due to reverse causality.

Rationality would suggest that advice-seeking investors receive benefits from costly financial advice. However, evidence documenting these benefits for U.S. investors has so far been lacking. This paper is the first to document that U.S. mutual fund investors indeed receive one of the many previously hypothesized benefits associated with financial advice. The documented benefit comes from valuable tax-management advice that helps investors avoid taxable fund distributions and becomes even more valuable when investors face distributions that can cause large and hard-to-predict tax liabilities. Additional evidence suggests that financial advice helps with other aspects of tax management such as tax-loss selling.

This paper investigates investment strategies that exploit the low-beta anomaly. Although the notion of buying low-beta stocks and selling high-beta stocks is natural, a choice is necessary with respect to the relative weighting of high-beta stocks and low-beta stocks in the investment portfolio. Our empirical results for US large-cap stocks show that this choice is very important for the risk-return characteristics of the resulting portfolios and their sensitivities to common risk factors. We also show that investment strategies based on betas have a natural-hedge component and a market-timing component due to the stochastic variation of betas. We construct indicators to exploit the market-timing component and show that they have substantial predictive power for future market returns. Corresponding market-timing strategies deliver large positive excess returns and high Sharpe ratios.

We document that the speed of information dissemination within mutual fund families positively affects the performance of member funds. This suggests that the resulting benefits of higher information precision far outweigh free-riding costs associated with fast internal dissemination. The performance effect intensifies when information travels across managers from different rather than same styles. This is consistent with fast information diffusion aggregating complementary insights that sharpen information precision, but also with fewer free-riding opportunities among managers from different styles. Managers exploit the resulting higher information precision rationally by trading more, relying less on public information, and investing differently from unaffiliated peers.

The validity of the price marks placed on bonds for valuation purposes is important for a diverse group of stakeholders, including investors, mutual fund managers, dealers, pricing services, and financial regulators. We analyze the dispersion of monthend price marks simultaneously placed on identical corporate bonds by different US mutual fund managers before and after TRACE dissemination and introductions of issuers into Markit's Credit Default Swap spread database. We find large and statistically significant decreases in mark dispersion of newly disseminated bonds around key TRACE system rollout events. Dispersion for large, investment grade bonds fell 20% to 83% after the start of TRACE reporting. We also find evidence of spillover effects for non-disseminated bonds. During the pre-TRACE period, we find some evidence that mark dispersion fell for investment grade issuers after introductions into Markit's database. Our results provide support for the idea that the TRACE transparency initiative reduced information inequality within the institutional side of the market. The original NASD concern about people "operating largely in the dark" effectively applied to professional fund managers.

Mutual funds are part of larger organizations, which make decisions with consequences for all their member funds. This study examines how the efficiency of trading desks operated by fund families affects the performance and trading of affiliated funds. We introduce a novel approach to measure the efficiency of trading desks, which allows for comparisons across families with different investable universes. By operating efficient trading desks, which reduce trading costs, fund families improve the performance of their funds significantly. Furthermore, the lower trading costs resulting from more efficient trading desks enable mutual funds to trade more and hold less liquid portfolios.

We document that prior work experience of mutual fund managers outside of the asset management industry is valuable from an investment perspective in that it provides managers with a stock picking and industry timing advantage. Fund managers' stock picks from industries where they previously worked outperform stock picks from their non-experience industries by about three percent annually. Also, fund managers are better at timing the returns of their experience industries than those of other industries. Moreover, the investment value of managers' prior work experience is greater for industries comprised of stocks that are harder to value.

Using detailed options holdings, we examine how mutual funds' use of options affects performance and risk. Using options generates, on average, no performance advantages. In fact, funds that follow certain distinct strategies underperformed. The only salutary impact is lower portfolio risk for a subset of funds that buy puts for insurance. Perhaps wanting to limit additional losses, these funds also respond to poor performance in the first part of the year by reducing portfolio risk. Our findings suggest no permanent or temporary aggressive risk taking by options users, suggesting instead that some funds use options primarily for risk management.

We investigate the abilities of buy-side analysts by analyzing nontraditional mutual funds that are exclusively managed by in-house analysts rather than traditional portfolio managers. Analysts exhibit stronger general and job-specific investment abilities than traditional managers from within and outside the fund family. Using holdings of analystrun funds as a proxy for the analysts' best ideas, we document that more-skilled portfolio managers rely on analysts' ideas from the same family to a lesser extent than less-skilled managers. We find that analysts' abilities matter in that they are positively related to the future performance of other funds within the same family.

We provide evidence on the valuation of equity positions by hedge fund advisors. Reported valuations deviate from standard valuations based on closing prices from CRSP for roughly seven percent of the positions. These deviations are economically significant for about 25 percent of the hedge fund advisors. Advisors with more pronounced valuation deviations show a stronger discontinuity in their reported returns around zero, manage a higher fraction of potentially fraudulent funds, show smoother reported returns, self-report to commercial databases, and are domiciled in offshore locations. Additional tests suggest that the documented equity valuation deviations respond to past performance.

US equity mutual funds, on average, prefer realization of capital losses to capital gains. Nevertheless, a substantial fraction exhibits the disposition effect of realizing gains more readily than losses. My analysis suggests that learning effects have reduced the manifestation of the disposition effect over time, implying that academic research has influenced industry practices. When funds experience outflows and are managed by teams of portfolio managers they are more susceptible to selling disproportionately more winners than losers. Disposition-driven behavior affects investment style, causing lower market betas and characteristics of value-oriented and contrarian styles but has no observable effect on fund performance.

This is the first study of corporate-bond mutual fund performance that examines detailed security-level holdings and returns. The new database allows us to decompose the costs and benefits of active management. In contrast to prior research on equity funds that shows evidence of stock-selection ability, we do not find evidence consistent with bond fund managers, on average, being able to select corporate bonds that outperform other bonds with similar characteristics. We find neutral to weakly positive evidence of ability to time corporate bond characteristics. Overall results show that the costs of active management on average appear larger than the benefits.