In this paper I analyze investors’ reactions to changes in the expense ratios of equity mutual funds. I show that investment flows’ response to fees cannot be fully explained by looking at investors’ performance sensitivity. While performance sensitivity monotonically increases with past performance, price sensitivity does not: investors who buy top past performers seem to be “distracted” by the fund’s previous return and pay relatively little attention to the expense ratios. Moreover price sensitivity increases with fund visibility while performance sensitivity decreases, and while looking at data from 1986 to 2006 no discernible trend can be observed in the average performance sensitivity, price sensitivity strongly increases due to the dramatic increase in the availability of mutual funds’ information for retail investors. Finally I show that investment companies strategically time their repricing decisions in order to exploit time variations in price and performance sensitivities, and that fund governance quality affects the degree to which investment companies engage in this opportunistic behavior.

In this paper I analyze investors’ reactions to changes in the expense ratios of equity mutual funds. I show that investment flows’ response to fees cannot be fully explained by looking at investors’ performance sensitivity. While performance sensitivity monotonically increases with past performance, price sensitivity does not: investors who buy top past performers seem to be “distracted” by the fund’s previous return and pay relatively little attention to the expense ratios. Moreover price sensitivity increases with fund visibility while performance sensitivity decreases, and while looking at data from 1986 to 2006 no discernible trend can be observed in the average performance sensitivity, price sensitivity strongly increases due to the dramatic increase in the availability of mutual funds’ information for retail investors. Finally I show that investment companies strategically time their repricing decisions in order to exploit time variations in price and performance sensitivities, and that fund governance quality affects the degree to which investment companies engage in this opportunistic behavior.

In this paper, we empirically analyze the factors affecting the cross section of mutual fund fee dispersion. In the context of equity mutual funds, fee dispersion stems primarily from the heterogeneity of products, clienteles and production functions. However, the relevant theory predicts that search costs can also generate fee dispersion. By controlling for observable sources of heterogeneity, we find that fee dispersion decreases with fund size and age, as well as with the amount of assets under management of the investment company. In addition, we find lower levels of fee dispersion for funds that charge marketing and distribution fees. Although we cannot rule out the possibility that these factors are a proxy for some unobserved source of heterogeneity, our results are also consistent with the theoretical prediction that search costs positively affect fee dispersion.

We ask whether loads affect investment flows in the US mutual fund industry. We argue that sales fees make the investment decision partially irreversible. Under these circumstances investors await for a stronger signal of managerial ability before committing to a new fund. This stronger signal can take the form of a particularly strong performance or a particularly long series of positive performance realizations. Looking at pairs of fund shares with the same portfolio but different sales fee arrangements we show that investment flows in share classes with front loads react disproportionally to good performances (higher convexity in the flow-performance relationship) and react to performance realizations further back in time (longer memory). A counterfactual example of fund shares with back-end loads allows us to rule out the hypothesis that this behavior is due to the incentive structure of brokers. Finally we show that these behavioral modifications induced by front loads have a negative and significant effect on investors’ timing ability.

In this paper, we examine the effect of financial analysts on the quality of corporate investment decisions. We show that greater analyst coverage leads to higher total factor productivity within firms, a finding that is robust after using both an instrumental variable approach and an experimental design that exploits exogenous reductions in analyst coverage due to broker mergers and closures. We further identify that the positive effect of analysts on firm-level productivity emanates from their critical role in information distribution and external monitoring within more opaque and financially constrained firms and also firms with weaker investor protection.