This paper examines the role that advertising plays in the mutual fund industry and whether advertising affects investors’ fund and portfolio choices. Content analysis shows that only a small fraction of fund advertising is directly informative about characteristics relevant for rational investors, such as fund fees. Higher quantities of advertising do not signal ex ante higher unobservable fund manager ability, because funds that advertise more are not associated with higher post-advertising excess returns. Fund advertising is shown to affect investors’choices, although it provides little information. These results do not seem to be driven by the endogeneity of advertising, and are robust to a series of robustness checks. Finally, advertising is found to steer people towards portfolios with higher fees and more risk, through higher exposure to equities, more active management, more “hot” sectors, and more home bias. This evidence has implications for welfare analysis, asset pricing and public policy, and may serve as a starting point for broader analysis of marketing and persuasion efforts in financial markets
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Paper provided by Ohio State University, Charles A. Dice Center for Research in Financial Economics in its series Working Paper Series with number
2006-16.
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Find related papers by JEL classification: G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Brown, Stephen J & Goetzmann, William N, 1995.
" Performance Persistence,"
Journal of Finance,
American Finance Association, vol. 50(2), pages 679-98, June.
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Sendhil Mullainathan & Andrei Shleifer, 2005.
"Persuasion in Finance,"
NBER Working Papers
11838, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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