[Advisors often manage multiple versions of a fund. These "twins" have the same manager and similar performance but are sold to different investors with differing abilities to select and monitor managers. Comparing investor flows in retail and institutional twins, we find that institutional investors are more sensitive to high fees and poor risk-adjusted performance. Consistent with the reduction of agency problems from greater monitoring, retail funds with an institutional twin outperform other retail funds by 1.5% per year. After the institutional twin is created, expenses decrease while measures of managerial effort at the retail fund increase.]

Incubation is a strategy for initiating new funds, where multiple funds are started privately, and, at the end of an evaluation period, some are opened to the public. Consistent with incubation being used by fund families to increase performance and attract flows, funds in incubation outperform nonincubated funds by 3.5% risk‐adjusted, and when they are opened to the public they attract higher flows. Postincubation, however, this outperformance disappears. This performance reversal imparts an upward bias to returns that is not removed by a fund size filter. Fund age and ticker creation date filters, however, eliminate the bias.

[Regulations allow market makers to short sell without borrowing stock, and the transactions of a major options market maker show that in most hard-to-borrow situations, it chooses not to borrow and instead fails to deliver stock to its buyers. A part of the value of failing passes through to options prices: when failing is cheaper than borrowing, the relation between borrowing costs and options prices is significantly weaker. The remaining value is profit to the market maker, and its ability to profit despite competition between market makers appears to result from the cost advantage of larger market makers.]

This study provides empirical evidence on the role of disclosure in resolving agency conflicts in delegated investment management. For certain expenditures, fund managers have alternative means of payment which differ greatly in their opacity: payments can be expensed (relatively transparent); or bundled with brokerage commissions (relatively opaque). We find that the return impact of opaque payments is significantly more negative than that of transparent payments. Moreover, we find a differential flow reaction that confirms the opacity of commission bundling. Collectively, our results demonstrate the importance of transparency in addressing agency costs of delegated investment management.

We examine the role of factor models and simple performance heuristics in investor decision-making using Morningstar’s 2002 rating methodology change. Before the change, flows strongly correlated with CAPM alphas. After, when funds are ranked by size and book-to-market groups, flows become more sensitive to 3-factor alphas (FF3). Flows to a matched institutional sample (same managers/strategies) follow FF3 before and after the change but are unrelated to the CAPM. Placebo tests with sector funds and other factor loadings show no effects. Our results imply that improvements in simple performance heuristics can result in more sophisticated risk adjustment by retail investors.

Advisors often manage multiple versions of a fund. These “twins” have the same manager and similar performance but are sold to different investors with differing abilities to select and monitor managers. Comparing investor flows in retail and institutional twins, we find that institutional investors are more sensitive to high fees and poor risk-adjusted performance. Consistent with the reduction of agency problems from greater monitoring, retail funds with an institutional twin outperform other retail funds by 1.5% per year. After the institutional twin is created, expenses decrease while measures of managerial effort at the retail fund increase.

We examine diseconomies of scale for two different investment approaches: quantitative and fundamental. Using separate account (SA) data where the investment approach is self-identified, we find that fundamental SAs exhibit greater diseconomies of scale than quantitative SAs. Looking at liquidity costs, we find that quantitative SAs hold more diversified portfolios of higher liquidity stocks than fundamental SAs, thereby reducing their expected liquidity costs. We also find that consistent with lower information processing/hierarchy costs, the speed of information diffusion is higher for quant SAs. Accounting for these differences helps to explain the differences in diseconomies of scale.

Regulations allow market makers to short sell without borrowing stock, and the transactions of a major options market maker show that in most hard-to-borrow situations, it chooses not to borrow and instead fails to deliver stock to its buyers. A part of the value of failing passes through to options prices: when failing is cheaper than borrowing, the relation between borrowing costs and options prices is significantly weaker. The remaining value is profit to the market maker, and its ability to profit despite competition between market makers appears to result from the cost advantage of larger market makers.