Judith A. Chevalier

Risk Taking by Mutual Funds as a Response to Incentives

This paper examines a potential agency conflict between mutual fund investors and mutual fund companies. Investors would like the fund company to use its judgment to maximize risk‐adjusted fund returns. A fund company, however, in its desire to maximize its value as a concern, has an incentive to take actions that increase the inflow of investments. We use a semiparametric model to estimate the shape of the flow‐performance relationship for a sample of growth and growth and income funds observed over the 1982–92 period. The shape of the flow‐performance relationship creates incentives for fund managers to increase or decrease the riskiness of the fund that are dependent on the funds year‐to‐date return. We examine portfolio holdings of mutual funds in September and December and show that mutual funds do alter the riskiness of their portfolios at the end of the year in a manner consistent with these incentives.

Are Some Mutual Fund Managers Better Than Others? Cross-Sectional Patterns in Behavior and Performance

We examine whether mutual fund performance is related to characteristics of fund managers that may indicate ability, knowledge, or effort. In particular, we study the relationship between performance and the managers age, the average composite SAT score at the managers undergraduate institution, and whether the manager has an MBA. Although the raw data suggest striking return differences between managers with different characteristics, most of these can be explained by behavioral differences between managers and by selection biases. After adjusting for these, some performance differences remain. In particular, managers who attended higher-SAT undergraduate institutions have systematically higher risk-adjusted excess returns. Copyright The American Finance Association 1999.

Measuring Prices and Price Competition Online: Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com

Despite the interest in measuring price sensitivity of online consumers, most academic work on Internet commerce is hindered by a lack of data on quantity. In this paper we use publicly available data on the sales ranks of about 20,000 books to derive quantity proxies at the two leading online booksellers. Matching this information to prices, we can directly estimate the elasticities of demand facing both merchants as well as create a price index for online books. The results show significant price sensitivity at both merchants but demand at BarnesandNoble.com is much more price-elastic than is demand at Amazon.com. The data also allow us to estimate the magnitude of bias in the CPI due to the rise of Internet sales.

Promotional Reviews: An Empirical Investigation of Online Review Manipulation

Online reviews could, in principle, greatly improve the match between consumers and products. However, the authenticity of online user reviews remains a concern; firms have an incentive to manufacture positive reviews for their own products and negative reviews for their rivals. In this paper, we marry the diverse literature on economic subterfuge with the literature on organizational form. We undertake an empirical analysis of promotional reviews, examining both the extent to which fakery occurs and the market conditions that encourage or discourage promotional reviewing activity. Specifically, we examine hotel reviews, exploiting the organizational differences between two travel websites: Expedia.com, and Tripadvisor.com. While anyone can post a review on Tripadvisor, a consumer could only post a review of a hotel on Expedia if the consumer actually booked at least one night at the hotel through the website. We examine differences in the distribution of reviews for a given hotel between Tripadvisor and Expedia. We show in a simple model that the net gains from promotional reviewing are likely to be highest for independent hotels that are owned by single-unit owners and lowest for branded chain hotels that are owned by multi-unit owners. Our methodology thus isolates hotels with a disproportionate incentive to engage in promotional reviewing activity. We show that hotels with a high incentive to fake have a greater share of five star (positive) reviews on Tripadvisor relative to Expedia. Furthermore, we show that the hotel neighbors of hotels with a high incentive to fake have more one and two star (negative) reviews on Tripadvisor relative to Expedia.

Identifying Investor Sentiment from Price Paths: The Case of Football Betting

We examine the hypothesis that sentimental bettors can affect the path of prices in football betting markets. We hypothesize that sentimental traders follow the advice of false experts, believe excessively in momentum strategies, bet excessively on teams that are well known and covered in the media. We generate proxies for these sources of sentiment and show that point spreads move predictably over the course of the week, partially in response to variables known prior to the opening of betting. We show that a betting strategy of betting against the predicted movement in the point spread is borderline profitable. Copyright 1999 by University of Chicago Press.

Herding over the career

Abstract We develop a model of decision-making when managers have private information about their abilities. With no private information about ability, managers ‘herd’. However, with sufficient private information, managers inefficiently ‘anti-herd’. The model potentially illuminates recent empirical work on career concerns.

Are Women Overinvesting in Education? Evidence from the Medical Profession

Recent literature finds that women earn significantly lower returns to professional degrees. Does this render these degrees poor investments for women? We compare physicians to physician assistants, a similar profession with lower wages and training costs, mitigating some selection issues. The median female (but not male) primary-care physician would have been financially better off becoming a physician assistant. While there is a wage gap, our result occurs primarily because most female physicians do not work enough hours to rationalize medical school whereas most men do. We discuss robustness issues and nonwage returns to education that may rationalize these investments by women.

State Casket Sales Restrictions: A Pointless Undertaking?

We utilize a new micro data set of prices of funeral goods and services at individual funeral homes, plus data from the Economic Census, to examine the effects of state regulations that restrict entry into the funeral goods market. In particular, some states have regulations that allow only licensed funeral homes to sell caskets, while others allow unlicensed retailers, such as Costco, to sell them. However, as caskets and funeral services are complements, generally purchased in one‐to‐one proportions, it is not a priori clear that casket sales restrictions can expand the rent extraction capabilities of licensed funeral homes. Our results suggest that when courts lift funeral goods sales restrictions, the prices of funeral goods fall but the prices of funeral services rise by nearly as much. Overall, our results support the one‐monopoly‐rent hypothesis; we do not find that, overall, funeral home revenues decline when restrictions on funeral goods sales are lifted.

Valuing Internet Retailers: Amazon and Barnes and Noble

Many Internet retailers must raise margins in the future if they are to survive. This raises the important issues of whether they will be able to raise margins as well as how valuation estimates made today should evaluate projected changes to margins in the future. In this paper, we describe retail strategies of pricing for market share in growing markets and show how measures of the price elasticity of demand facing retailers in the current year can be combined with standard accounting variables to inform calculations about future margins. Our analysis suggests that the capital market projects greater future margin improvements for Amazon.com than for BN.com and that this may be due to Amazon benefiting from network effects.

The Value of Flexible Work: Evidence from Uber Drivers

Participation in non-traditional work arrangements has increased dramatically over the last decade, including in settings where new technologies lower the transaction costs of providing labor flexibly. One prominent example of flexible work is the ride-sharing company Uber, which allows drivers to provide (or not provide) rides anytime they are willing to accept prevailing wages for providing this service. An Uber-style arrangement offers workers flexibility in both setting a customized work schedule and also adjusting the schedule from week to week, day to day, and hour to hour. Using data on hourly earnings for Uber drivers, we document the ways in which drivers utilize this real-time flexibility and we estimate the driver surplus generated by this flexibility. We estimate how drivers’ reservation wages vary from hour to hour, which allows us to examine the surplus and supply implications of both flexible and traditional work arrangements. Our results indicate that, while the Uber relationship may have other drawbacks, Uber drivers benefit significantly from real-time flexibility, earning more than twice the surplus they would in less flexible arrangements. If required to supply labor inflexibly at prevailing wages, they would also reduce the hours they supply by more than two-thirds.