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

Performance scalability analysis of JavaScript applications with web workers

Web applications are getting closer to the performance of native applications taking advantage of new standard–based technologies. The recent HTML5 standard includes, among others, the Web Workers API that allows executing JavaScript applications on multiple threads, or workers. However, the internals of the browser’s JavaScript virtual machine does not expose direct relation between workers and running threads in the browser and the utilization of logical cores in the processor. As a result, developers do not know how performance actually scales on different environments and therefore what is the optimal number of workers on parallel JavaScript codes. This paper presents the first performance scalability analysis of parallel web apps with multiple workers. We focus on two case studies representative of different worker execution models. Our analyses show performance scaling on different parallel processor microarchitectures and on three major web browsers in the market. Besides, we study the impact of co–running applications on the web app performance. The results provide insights for future approaches to automatically find out the optimal number of workers that provide the best tradeoff between performance and resource usage to preserve system responsiveness and user experience, especially on environments with unexpected changes on system workload.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

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. 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 to those set by better-performing funds. These predictions are supported by available empirical evidence.Mutual fund fees; Mutual fund performance; Product quality; Asymmetric information; Bounded rationality;

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

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. 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 to those set by better-performing funds. These predictions are supported by available empirical evidence.Publicad

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. 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 to those set by better-performing funds. These predictions are supported by available empirical evidence

Analysis and architectural support for parallel stateful packet processing

The evolution of network services is closely related to the network technology trend. Originally network nodes forwarded packets from a source to a destination in the network by executing lightweight packet processing, or even negligible workloads. As links provide more complex services, packet processing demands the execution of more computational intensive applications. Complex network applications deal with both packet header and payload (i.e. packet contents) to provide upper layer network services, such as enhanced security, system utilization policies, and video on demand management.Applications that provide complex network services arise two key capabilities that differ from the low layer network applications: a) deep packet inspection examines the packet payload tipically searching for a matching string or regular expression, and b) stateful processing keeps track information of previous packet processing, unlike other applications that don't keep any data about other packet processing. In most cases, deep packet inspection also integrates stateful processing.Computer architecture researches aim to maximize the system throughput to sustain the required network processing performance as well as other demands, such as memory and I/O bandwidth. In fact, there are different processor architectures depending on the sharing degree of hardware resources among streams (i.e. hardware context). Multicore architectures present multiple processing engines within a single chip that share cache levels of memory hierarchy and interconnection network. Multithreaded architectures integrates multiple streams in a single processing engine sharing functional units, register file, fecth unit, and inner levels of cache hierarchy. Scalable multicore multithreaded architectures emerge as a solution to overcome the requirements of high throughput systems. We call massively multithreaded architectures to the architectures that comprise tens to hundreds of streams distributed across multiple cores on a chip. Nevertheless, the efficient utilization of these architectures depends on the application characteristics. On one hand, emerging network applications show large computational workloads with significant variations in the packet processing behavior. Then, it is important to analyze the behavior of each packet processing to optimally assign packets to threads (i.e. software context) for reducing any negative interaction among them. On the other hand, network applications present Packet Level Parallelism (PLP) in which several packets can be processed in parallel. As in other paradigms, dependencies among packets limit the amount of PLP. Lower network layer applications show negligible packet dependencies. In contrast, complex upper network applications show dependencies among packets leading to reduce the amount of PLP.In this thesis, we address the limitations of parallelism in stateful network applications to maximize the throughput of advanced network devices. This dissertation comprises three complementary sets of contributions focused on: network analysis, workload characterization and architectural proposal.The network analysis evaluates the impact of network traffic on stateful network applications. We specially study the impact of network traffic aggregation on memory hierarchy performance. We categorize and characterize network applications according to their data management. The results point out that stateful processing presents reduced instruction level parallelism and high rate of long latency memory accesses. Our analysis reveal that stateful applications expose a variety of levels of parallelism related to stateful data categories. Thus, we propose the MultiLayer Processing (MLP) as an execution model to exploit multiple levels of parallelism. The MLP is a thread migration based mechanism that increases the sinergy among streams in the memory hierarchy and alleviates the contention in critical sections of parallel stateful workloads

Simulación y diseño del prototipo de un cuadricóptero

El mercado de los drones está teniendo una gran expansión estos últimos años incorporando nuevas tecnologías que nos permiten llevar a cabo una gran cantidad tareas a un coste muy inferior a sus competidores tecnológicos (Helicópteros de fotografía aérea, repartidores de paquetes, etc) y dando muchas posibilidades para llevarlas a cabo. Es por ello que este proyecto va a centrarse en un área más concreta, en este caso se llevará a cabo un diseño de un prototipo de un dron pensado para ser utilizado en aeromodelismo y con posibilidades de ser mejorado en un futuro con la adición de componentes de grabación y fotografía. El objetivo es permitir al usuario final comprar una aeronave con altas capacidades de maniobrabilidad y buenas prestaciones a un precio de entrada asequible. El trabajo está centrado en el realizar un simulador de vuelo realizado con Excel capaz de reflejar los movimientos del dron utilizando datos experimentales de pruebas de motores y propiedades de un modelo en 3D propio, elaborado con SolidWorks integrando todos los componentes indispensables para las necesidades del aparato. Para realizar el diseño se realiza un estudio de las propuestas de mercado actuales junto con los datos experimentales obtenidos en las pruebas de motores. Se proponen 4 propuestas, se decide la mejor y por último se mejora en la medida de lo posible, para poder ser estudiada mediante elementos finitos en un trabajo futuro

Missing in media communication

Gabriel Cruz, Julen Jiménez, Diana Quer, Marta del Castillo, Yéremy Vargas o las niñas de Alcàsser son algunas de las víctimas de los casos de desapariciones más conocidos y mediáticos de los últimos años en nuestro país. Sin embargo, ¿Qué los hace especiales? Según el Ministerio del Interior, cada año en España desaparecen en torno a 14.000 personas. Es evidente que los medios juegan un papel fundamental en la difusión de estos sucesos. La pregunta es: ¿Lo hacen de forma correcta? Desde hace ya muchos años, la prensa es sensacionalista, busca el morbo para conseguir audiencia y vulnera los derechos de las víctimas con total impunidad. Por ello, el principal objetivo de este trabajo es: Analizar, a través de la visión de diversos expertos, las noticias morbosas vertidas por algunos periodistas; explicar por qué unos sucesos se vuelven más mediáticos que otros; remarcar cuáles son las leyes que protegen a las víctimas de la violación de sus derechos; comprobar si la prensa entorpece las investigaciones policiales; determinar cuál debe ser la actitud de los periodistas cuando poseen información sensible; y descubrir si la población se vuelve cada vez más sensacionalista al consumir contenidos de este tipo.Gabriel Cruz, Julen Jiménez, Diana Quer, Marta del Castillo, Yéremy Vargas or the Alcàsser girls are some of the victims of the best known and media cases of disappearances of recent years in our country. However, what makes them special? According to the Ministry of Interior, around 14,000 people disappear every year in Spain. It is evident that the media play a fundamental role in the dissemination of these events. The question is: Do they do it correctly? For many years now, the press has been sensational, seeks morbidity to get an audience and violates the rights of victims with impunity. Therefore, the main objective of this work is: To analyze, through the vision of various experts, the morbid news published by some journalists; explain why some events become more media than others; highlight what are the laws that protect victims from the violation of their rights; check if the press hinders police investigations; determine what the attitude of journalists should be when they have sensitive information; and discover if the population becomes increasingly sensational when consuming content of this type