WHEN CHEAPER IS BETTER: FEE DETERMINATION IN THE MARKET FOR EQUITY MUTUAL FUNDS

In this paper, we develop a model of the market for equity mutual funds that captures three key characteristics of this market. First, there is competition among funds. Second, fund managers' ability is not observed by investors before making their investment decisions. And third, some investors do not make optimal use of all available information. The main results of the paper are that 1) price competition is compatible with positive mark-ups in equilibrium; and 2) worse-performing funds set fees that are greater or equal than those set by better-performing funds. These predictions are supported by available empirical evidence.

Corporate governance when managers set their own pay

This paper presents a model of the firm in which the manager has discretion over his own compensation, constrained only by the threat of shareholder intervention. The model addresses two questions: How does shareholder power affect managers' compensation and their incentives to maximize firm value? And, which is the optimal level of shareholder power? Increasing shareholder power leads to lower managerial pay, yet it also weakens managers' incentives to maximize value. The model shows that, because of this incentive effect, restricting shareholder power is necessary to obtain financing, and offers predictions about the relation between the optimal level of shareholder power, performance and firm characteristics.

YET ANOTHER PUZZLE? THE RELATION BETWEEN PRICE AND PERFORMANCE IN THE MUTUAL FUND INDUSTRY

Gruber (1996) drew attention to the puzzle that investors buy actively-managed funds even though, on average, they underperform index funds. We uncover another puzzling fact about the market for actively-managed equity mutual funds: funds with worse before-fee performance charge higher fees. We then conduct a series of robustness checks and find that the apparently anomalous fee-performance relation survives all of them. Finally, we show that this relation may be explained as the outcome of strategic fee setting by mutual funds in the presence of investors with different degrees of sensitivity to performance.

The performance of socially responsible mutual funds: the role of fees and management companies

In this paper, we shed light on the debate about the financial performance of socially responsible investment (SRI) mutual funds by separately analyzing the contributions of before-fee performance and fees to SRI funds' performance and by investigating the role played by fund management companies in the determination of those variables. We apply the matching estimator methodology to obtain our results and find that in the period 1997-2005, US SRI funds had significantly higher fees and better before- and after-fee performance than conventional funds with similar characteristics. Differences, however, were driven exclusively by SRI funds run by management companies specialized in socially responsible investment.Socially responsible investment, Mutual fund fees, Mutual fund performance, Matching estimators

Leverage, CEO Risk–Taking Incentives, and Bank Failure during the 2007–2010 Financial Crisis

Usual measures of the risk-taking incentives of bank CEOs do not capture the risk-shifting incentives that the exposure of a CEO’s wealth to his firm’s stock price (delta) creates in highly levered firms. We find evidence consistent with the importance of these incentives for bank CEOs: In a sample of large U.S. financial firms, a higher pre-crisis delta is associated with a significantly higher probability of failure during the 2007–2010 financial crisis in highly levered firms, but not in less levered firms