We examine the dynamics of assets under management (AUM) and management fees at the portfolio manager level in the closed-end fund industry. We find that managers capitalize on good past performance and favorable investor perceptions about future performance, as reflected in fund premiums, through AUM expansions and fee increases. However, the penalties for poor performance or unfavorable investor perceptions are either insignificant, or substantially mitigated by manager tenure. Long tenure is generally associated with poor performance and high discounts. Our findings suggest substantial managerial power in capturing CEF rents. We also document significant diseconomies of scale at the manager level.

[We develop a stock return-predictive measure based on an efficient aggregation of the portfolio holdings of all actively managed U.S. domestic equity mutual funds, and use this model to study the source of fund managers' stock selection abilities. This "generalized inverse alpha" (GIA) approach reveals differences in the ability of managers to predict firms' future earnings from fundamental research. Notably, the GIA's return-forecasting power is not subsumed by publicly available quantitative predictors, such as momentum, value, and earnings quality, nor is it subsumed by methods shown in past research to forecast stock returns using fund holdings or trades.]

We document a little-known source of information exploited by sophisticated institutional investors: the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a law that allows for the disclosure of previously unreleased information by the U.S. Government. Through FOIA requests, we identify several sophisticated institutional investors, chiefly hedge funds, that request information from the FDA. We explore the type of information commonly requested by funds and the types of firms that are targets of FDA-FOIA requests and show that FOIA requests allow these investors to generate abnormal returns. Thus, we illustrate a detailed mechanism through which costly information becomes incorporated into market prices.

We examine whether professional money managers overreact to large climatic disasters. We find that managers within a major disaster region underweight disaster zone stocks to a much greater degree than distant managers and that this aversion to disaster zone stocks is related to a salience bias that decreases over time and distance from the disaster, rather than to superior information possessed by close managers. This overreaction can be costly to fund investors for some especially salient disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes: a long-short strategy that exploits the overreaction generates a significant DGTW-adjusted return over the following 2 years.

We develop a stock return-predictive measure based on an efficient aggregation of the portfolio holdings of all actively managed U.S. domestic equity mutual funds, and use this model to study the source of fund managers' stock-selection abilities. This generalized-inverse alpha (GIA) approach reveals differences in the ability of managers to predict firms' future earnings from fundamental research. Notably, the GIA's return-forecasting power is not subsumed by publicly available quantitative predictors, such as momentum, value, and earnings quality, nor is it subsumed by methods shown in past research to forecast stock returns using fund holdings or trades.

We examine the dynamics of assets under management (AUM) and management fees at the portfolio manager level in the closed-end fund industry. We find that managers capitalize on good past performance and favorable investor perceptions about future performance, as reflected in fund premiums, through AUM expansions and fee increases. However, the penalties for poor performance or unfavorable investor perceptions are either insignificant, or substantially mitigated by manager tenure. Long tenure is generally associated with poor performance and high discounts. Our findings suggest substantial managerial power in capturing CEF rents. We also document significant diseconomies of scale at the manager level.

We examine institutional trading surrounding corporate news by combining a comprehensive database of newswire releases on U.S. firms with a high-frequency database of institutional trades. To identify the ability of institutions to predict or quickly interpret news, we form “news clusters” of related news about a particular firm that occurs in rapid succession. We find that institutions chiefly trade on the tone of news directly after the earliest news release in a cluster, and such news-motivated trading predicts returns over the following weeks. Our results suggest that institutional investors contribute to price efficiency through the speedy interpretation of public information.

We document a little-known source of information exploited by sophisticated institutional investors: the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a law that allows for the disclosure of previously unreleased information by the U.S. Government. Through FOIA requests, we identify several sophisticated institutional investors, chiefly hedge funds, that request information from the FDA. We explore the type of information commonly requested by funds and the types of firms that are targets of FDA-FOIA requests and show that FOIA requests allow these investors to generate abnormal returns. Thus, we illustrate a detailed mechanism through which costly information becomes incorporated into market prices. Received April 15, 2015; editorial decision April 16, 2016 by Editor Itay Goldstein.

We study investor redemptions and portfolio rebalancing decisions of prime money market mutual funds (MMFs) during the Eurozone crisis. We find that sophisticated investors selectively acquire information about MMFs’ risk exposures to Europe, which leads managers to withdraw funding from information-sensitive European issuers. That is, MMF managers, particularly those serving the most sophisticated investors, selectively adjust their portfolio risk exposures to avoid information-sensitive European risks, while maintaining or increasing risk exposures to other regions. This mechanism helps to explain the occurrence of selective “dry-ups” in debt markets where delegation is common and returns to information production are usually low.