Sky Blog
What is the effect of stock indexing on information arbitrage and the efficacy of the price discovery process? Forty-five years after John C. Bogle, the Vanguard Group founder, launched the world’s first index mutual fund, and 30 years after the …
Do fiduciary responsibilities have any effect on the behavior of firm insiders? In a series of studies, I find empirical evidence that stronger fiduciary duties reduce managerial risk taking. And that is not all. The evidence indicates that stronger fiduciary …
Shared series trusts – an entity structure of recent vintage used in organizing mutual funds or exchange traded funds – are a strange species in the world of business entities. Simply put, such entities are designed to provide governance in …
Why are security interests and legal entities both widely used? The prevailing answer in legal scholarship is that both bodies of law exist to partition assets for the benefit of designated creditors.[1] This view is not merely an academic …
Starting in November 2018, U.S. public, open-ended mutual funds will have the option to adjust the daily pricing of the fund—the net asset value or NAV—to account for and recoup large transaction costs. Currently, the fund, and therefore its remaining …
One of the most disputed policy initiatives of the Obama administration was the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, which subjects brokers and other financial professionals managing retirement accounts to a fiduciary duty to avoid conflicts and act in the best …
Mutual funds are becoming more like hedge funds as a matter of investment strategy while hedge funds are becoming more like mutual funds as a matter of the regulatory framework. The growth of the private fund industry and the proliferation …
Vanguard is the world’s largest complex of mutual funds, with over $3 trillion in assets under management, including $215 billion added in 2014. Vanguard’s main attraction to investors is its low costs. Profs. Freeman and Brown (2000) report that the …
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has proposed a set of liquidity risk management requirements for registered open-end mutual funds and ETFs. The proposal is part of a broader SEC agenda to modernize the Investment Company Act of 1940 (’40 …
A recent Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion charts potential new pathways for claims for damages resulting from portfolio losses by mutual fund shareholders against both a fund’s trustees and its investment adviser. However, much of the sweeping language and …
My recent article, Mutual Fund Sales Notice Fees: Are a Handful of States Unconstitutionally Exacting $200 Million Each Year? appearing in the current issue of the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, examines the constitutional validity of the notice filing fees paid …