Using data from individual Census records on the wealth of managers’ parents, we find that mutual fund managers from poor families outperform managers from rich families. We argue that managers born poor face higher entry barriers into asset management. Consistent with this view, managers born poor are promoted only if they outperform, while those born rich are more likely to be promoted for reasons unrelated to performance. Overall, we establish a first link between fund managers’ family descent and their ability to create value. Received December 8, 2016; editorial decision November 20, 2017 by Editor Andrew Karolyi.

Short sellers trade more on days with qualitative news, that is, news containing fewer numbers. We show that this behavior is not informationally motivated but can be explained by short sellers exploiting higher liquidity on such days. We document that liquidity and noise trading increase in the presence of qualitative news, enabling short sellers to better disguise their informed trades. Natural experiments support our findings. Qualitative news has a bigger effect on short sellers’ trading after a decrease in liquidity following the stock’s deletion from the Standard & Poor’s 500 index and a smaller effect when investor attention is distracted by the Olympic Games.

We study outsourcing relationships among international asset management firms. We find that, in companies that manage both outsourced and in‐house funds, in‐house funds outperform outsourced funds by 0.85% annually (57% of the expense ratio). We attribute this result to preferential treatment of in‐house funds via the preferential allocation of IPOs, trading opportunities, and cross‐trades, especially at times when in‐house funds face steep outflows and require liquidity. We explain preferential treatment with agency problems: it increases with the subcontractor's market power and the difficulty of monitoring the subcontractor, and decreases with the subcontractor's amount of parallel in‐house activity.