I solve in closed form for the optimal dynamic risk choice of a fund manager who is compensated with a high-water mark contract. The optimal risk choice depends on the ratio of the fund’s assets under management to its high-water mark. If the manager’s outside option value is low, investors’ termination policy is strict, or management fees are high, then negative returns induce the manager into...

We derive the optimal crowdfunding contract of a financially constrained monopolist and analyze its implications for production, investment and welfare. Crowdfunding contracts may serve as a price-discrimination mechanism, forcing pivotal consumers to pay a premium above the future spot price, thus increasing profits. When raising funds is costly, entrepreneurs balance the benefits from price d...

We exploit the expiring nature of hedge fund lockups to create a dynamic, fund-level proxy of funding liquidity risk. In contrast to the prior literature, our measure allows us to identify how within-fund changes in funding liquidity risk are associated with performance and risk taking. Lockup funds with lower funding liquidity risk take more tail risk and have better risk-adjusted performance,...

We consider a group of mean-variance investors with mimicking desire such that each investor is willing to penalize deviations of his portfolio composition from compositions of other group members. Penalizing norm constraints are already applied for statistical improvement of Markowitz portfolio procedure in order to cope with estimation risk. We relate these penalties to individuals’ wish of s...

This paper investigates whether certain individuals are prone to behavioral biases in their 401(k) investments. Using demographic data and allocation information for over 73,000 employees, the biases examined include two “allocation biases” and a “participation bias.” The findings suggest that higher salaried employees tend to make significantly better choices. Participants earning $100,000 hol...

This paper examines the performance of fund managers responsible for managing the investment decisions of UK pension funds. The paper examines both individual fund manager performance of pension funds under management, and also the persistence of this performance over time. Previous work on UK pension funds has found little evidence of fund manager persistence, but we suggest that this might be...

By applying tournament analysis to the UK Unit Trusts data, the results support significant risk shifting in the family tournament; i.e. interim winning managers tend to increase their level of risk exposure more than losing managers. It also shows that the risk-adjusted returns of the winners outperform those of the losers following the risk taking, which implies that risk altering can be rega...

where g1(x) = εg11(x)+ε g12(x)+ε g13(x), g2(x) = εg21(x) + ε g22(x) + ε g23(x) and f(x) = εf1(x) + εf2(x) + ε f3(x) where g1i, g2i, f2i have degree k, m and n respectively for each i = 1, 2, 3, and ε is a small parameter. Note that when g1(x) = 0 we obtain the generalized Liénard polynomial differential systems. We provide an upper bound of the maximum number of limit cycles that the previous d...

We use mutual fund flows as a measure of individual investor sentiment for different stocks, and find that high sentiment predicts low future returns. Fund flows are dumb money–by reallocating across different mutual funds, retail investors reduce their wealth in the long run. This dumb money effect is related to the value effect: high sentiment stocks tend to be growth stocks. High sentiment a...

I introduce a conditional measure of skill, the correlation between fund's trades and future news of the stocks traded. Using this measure, I show that the average fund manager in the cross-section of U.S. equity mutual funds has stock picking skill. This skill is mainly driven by manager's ability to predict rm's cashow news. Importantly, this skill has short term persistence, which is not exp...