Fees charged by mutual funds include front-end load charges, deferred sales charges that decrease over time, redemption fees that are imposed whenever shares are sold, and 12b-1 fees. Fees may be justified if they allow the fund to lower other costs or improve performance. In this paper, we find that, on average, 12b-1 fees, deferred sales charges, and redemption fees increase expenses whereas funds with front-end loads generally have lower expenses. We also find that funds with 12b-1 fees and redemption fees, on average, earn higher risk adjusted returns but funds with front-end load charges earn lower risk adjusted returns.

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We examine the level of underpricing and characteristics of equity carveouts (ECOs) from 1990 to 1998 (the 1990s) and from 1999 to 2000 (the bubble period). For a sample of 458 ECOs, we find a mean initial return of 8.75% for the 1990s and 47.76% for the bubble period. The results suggest that, similar to other initial public offerings (IPOs), ECOs have been more willing to accept underpricing through time because of an increased importance in analyst coverage and the increased use of spinning, the practice where investment bankers allocate IPOs to high-profile customers to garner potential future business. 2004 The Southern Finance Association and the Southwestern Finance Association.

We study the mergers of US publicly traded bank holding companies during 1987-2000 and find that the acquiring firm's sustainable growth rate is an important determinant of the cross-sectional variation in the merged entity's long-term operating and stock performance. The most economically significant determinants of the merged bank's abnormal stock return performance are the acquiring bank's estimated sustainable growth rate prior to the acquisition, as well as post-acquisition changes in this growth rate, and the bank's dividend payout ratio. Our findings are robust even after controlling for several potentially confounding factors. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2005.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the factors that affect the returns earned by investors in early trading of reverse LBOs and compare those results to factors affecting original IPOs which are matched by size, industry, and issue date. A mean excess return of 7.64% is observed for the sample of reverse LBOs during the period 1987 to 1998. This return is uniformly lower than returns earned by investing in original IPOs. These results support the information asymmetry hypothesis.The results also show that factors such as number of months the LBO was privately held, the over-allotment, or greenshoe option, the size of the issue, insider ownership, and gross spread impact the returns earned by investors in reverse LBOs. Other factors which are known to affect returns on original IPOs, such as lead underwriter, whether the deal was syndicated, the number of managers, the listing exchange, lockup agreements, and auditor, are shown to have no impact on the returns in reverse LBOs for the sample in question. We find that the level of insider participation and the over-allotment option are more important to original IPOs than to reverse LBOs in explaining the excess returns earned by shareholders in early trading. We find, however, that the size of the offering has more impact on excess returns for reverse LBOs than for original IPOs.