Career concerns in financial markets

What are the equilibrium features of a market where a sizeable portion of traders face career concerns? This question is central to our understanding of financial markets that are increasingly dominated by institutional investors. We construct a model of delegated portfolio management that captures key features of the US mutual fund industry and we embed it into an asset pricing set-up. Fund managers differ in their ability to understand market fundamentals, and in every period investors choose a fund. In equilibrium, the presence of career concerns induces uninformed fund managers to churn, i.e. to engage in trading even when they face a negative expected return. As churning plays the role of noise trading, the asset market displays non-fully informative prices and positive (and high) trading volume. The equilibrium relationship between fund return and net fund flows displays a skewed shape that is consistent with stylized facts. The robustness of our core results is probed from several angles.