Miguel I. Puertas

Using a novel dataset of private foundation returns and security-level holdings, we show that size and alternative-asset tilt generate no alpha once return smoothing is accounted for. Alpha is concentrated among foundations founded by hedge fund (HF) principals. Consistent with insider advantage rather than transferable skill, HF-affiliated foundations’ outperformance arises primarily from highly concentrated portfolios; across HF- and private-equity-affiliated foun- dations, holdings concealed from regulators predict alpha more strongly than disclosed ones, related investments predict alpha whereas unrelated investments do not, and alpha persists after founders retire. These findings challenge the view that alternative alpha is available to investors with sufficient capital and patience.

Full-service brokers manage more than $10 trillion of retail assets while charging substantially higher fees than many alternative brokerage options. Although these fees are increasingly transparent, disclosures typically present fees in annual terms. We investigate whether investors struggle to process the cumulative effects of annual fees on long-term wealth. Using survey experiments with full-service brokerage clients, we document that investors are poorly calibrated about fee levels, become more fee-sensitive when cumulative wealth effects are made explicit, and increasingly misjudge fees as horizons lengthen. Our results suggest investors underestimate how annual fees translate to lifetime costs.

We examine 292,126 mergers and acquisitions reported by SDC from 1992 through 2025 and document substantial changes in both the composition and observability of the M&A mar- ket. Transactions involving listed buyers have declined sharply, while private and investment- oriented acquirers have become increasingly important. At the same time, deal-level infor- mation has become less available, including within comparable private-buyer categories. Con- ventional requirements such as observable announcement returns and reported deal values therefore increasingly select a smaller and systematically different subset of M&A activity. We use subsidiary acquisitions to illustrate the economic consequences of this selection. Subsidiary transactions differ from stand-alone private acquisitions in governance, information, and the role of the selling parent. Requiring observable announcement returns also changes the industry composition of the subsidiary sample and can alter conclusions about subsequent acquisition activity. Our results highlight the importance of considering how data requirements shape the population of transactions represented in empirical M&A research.

Prevalent measures of information asymmetry in finance either quantify causes of asymmetry between corporate insiders and outsiders, or proxy for asymmetry using market outcomes. In contrast, we introduce a novel measure, the InfoGap, to quantify the asymmetry between outside investors, distinct from the traditional information asymmetry between insiders and outsiders. Using social media data, we develop a methodology to directly extract information asymmetry signals. We show that when the InfoGap is high, uninformed investors incorporate less hard-to-process information into their beliefs, consistent with increased investor-level information asymmetry. Finally, we show that higher investor-level information asymmetry is associated with a deterioration in market quality, consistent with sophisticated investors attempting to capitalize on their superior information. In contrast, the market deterioration associated with traditional measures of firm-level asymmetry is largely driven by market withdrawal, consistent with sophisticated investors avoiding markets where they are at an informational disadvantage.