The Distortion in Prices Due to Passive Investing

In the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), it is ex post optimal to index. To examine the implications of market indexing, we develop a conditional CAPM with costless private information in which some investors are, for exogenous reasons, ex ante indexers. We show that, as more nonindexers become indexers, the price efficiency of stocks diminishes, asset prices comove, and the statistical fit (measured by R2) of the CAPM regression decreases. We also report asset prices at the limit, when 100% of the investors are market indexers. This paper was accepted by Tyler Shumway, finance.

Marketing Mutual Funds

Marketing and distribution expenses are responsible for about one-third of the cost of active management in the mutual fund industry. Estimating a structural model with costly investor search and learning about fund skill, we find that marketing is nearly as important as performance and fees in determining fund size. Eliminating marketing substantially improves welfare: capital shifts toward cheaper funds and competition decreases fees; active funds shrink and capital allocation becomes more closely aligned with skill. Declining investor search costs imply a reduction in marketing expenses and management fees as well as a shift toward passive investing, as observed empirically.

Do Socially Conscious ETFs Match Their Active Counterparts?

Over the past decade, Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) has grown at a rapid pace and, by some estimates, now represents a quarter of the $48 trillion in assets under professional management in the United States. At the same time, investors have broadly shifted from active to passive investing strategies. While there is significant research in each of these respective areas, we believe that we are the first to examine whether a socially conscious investor can employ a passive approach or if the constrained nature of SRI necessitates active management. As such, we examine the performance of socially conscious ETFs versus a matched sample of actively managed SRI mutual funds. We find the performance, as a whole, to be insignificantly different between the two groups, suggesting that the benefits of active management in this construct effectively offset the cost advantage of passive ETFs.