André de Souza

• São Paulo State University

The recent geographic spread of Leishmania infantum along the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay has been highlighted. In our previous study, Lutzomyia longipalpis was found in 55 of 123 patches surveyed, and in some patches, sandflies were found at higher densities, forming hotspots. Based on the One Health approach, we investigated the sea...

Background: The recent geographic expansion of Leishmania infantum vectors in the triple border area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay has highlighted the need to know the seasonality, parasite infection rate, and the factors that contribute the dispersal and handling of this parasite. Methods: Entomological, quantitative longitudinal studies were...

One of the major trends in the mutual fund industry is the rising importance of passive investing. One of the responses of the investment community to this challenge has been the creation of enhanced return index funds. In this paper, we examine the performance of enhanced index funds and find that they outperform index funds when we analyze both p...

Over 26% of investment company assets are held in passively managed vehicles. Thus, it is important to understand what affects the performance of passive vehicles and how to choose among the multiple passive options following any index. This paper examines the factors that are important in explaining differences across funds following the same inde...

A number of papers have demonstrated that over historical periods, a specified set of factors has outperformed actively managed funds. In almost all cases, however, the factors used or the procedures followed are not replicable by tradable passive investments. In addition, tradable passive investments have expense ratios that almost always cause th...

Managers of Fund of Funds have access to information not available to the general public in evaluating funds from their own family. However, they may have family or self-serving motives that can hurt shareholder performance. By examining a history of individual transactions of funds of funds, we show that managers of Fund of Funds despite access to...

There is a vast literature which shows that investors don't make rational decisions in allocating resources among different investments. Target risk funds and target date funds are two types of mutual funds primarily organised as fund of funds that make the asset allocation decision for an investor. Both are used as options in 401(k) plans and Indi...

As a result of poor asset allocation decisions by 401(k) participants, 72% of all plans now offer target date funds, and participants heavily invest in them. Here, we study the characteristics and performance of TDFs, providing a unique view by employing data on TDFs holdings. We show that additional expenses charged by TDFs are largely offset by t...

There is a vast literature which shows that investors don’t make rational decisions in allocating resources among both different types of investments and different individual investments. Target risk funds and target date funds are two types of mutual funds that make the asset allocation decision for an investor Target risk funds have not been stud...

We develop a new methodology that allows conditional performance to be a function of information available at the start of the performance period but does not make assumptions about the behavior of the conditional betas. We use econometric techniques developed by Lynch and Wachter (2011) that use all available factor return, instrument, and mutual...

I study the effect of flow on mutual fund performance. I exploit the fact that investors respond to raw return, controlling for alpha, to create fund portfolios sorted along the two dimensions of skill (proxied for by alpha) and flow (proxied for by raw return). Performance increases in skill and, as conjectured by earlier work, decreases in flow....

When voting in a company's shareholder meetings, mutual fund families which hold more debt than equity in that company vote differently on certain types of proposi-tions than families which hold relatively more equity. I conclude that these classes of propositions do not affect bondholders and stockholders in the same way, and infer how bondholders...