Publications

This paper investigates the distribution of benefits from lower-cost institutional investment vehicles, such as collective investment trusts and separate accounts. While these vehicles can offer substantial fee advantages over mutual funds, we find that benefit realization depends on access structure. Direct access delivers significant cost savings to investors, whereas feeder fund structures often allow intermediaries to capture these benefits while charging investors traditional mutual fund fees.

This paper documents that target-date funds frequently deviate from their stated target allocations, with deviations correlating within fund families and persisting over time. These deviations are more pronounced in years without disclosed target allocation information and negatively correlate with previous-year flows.