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Over the past 20 years, a trend toward index fund investing has emerged. Currently, more mutual fund assets are indexed to the S&P 500 than any other index. Prior research on downward-sloping demand curves suggests that widespread acceptance of S&P 500 index investing may push prices of companies in the S&P 500 beyond fundamental values. This paper explores the impact of flows into S&P 500 index funds on corporate valuations. The results show that money flow into S&P 500 index funds is inflating the values of companies in the index relative to those outside of the index. JEL Classifications: G11 (investment decisions), G12 (asset pricing), G23 (private financial institutions)

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Comments are enormously welcome!

Since 2011, Morningstar has issued Morningstar Analyst Ratings on many of the largest mutual funds in the United States. In June 2017, Morningstar launched the Morningstar Quantitative Rating™ to provide a forward‐looking rating on all mutual funds. Morningstar uses a “robo‐rater” machine‐learning model to assign Morningstar Quantitative Ratings. However, the “robo‐rater” cannot utilize the complete set of information available to Morningstar's analyst as it cannot process “soft information.” The purpose of this study is to evaluate if and how this “robo‐rater” is conducive to mutual fund selection. I find no evidence that the “robo‐rater” offers value to investors beyond its assessment of mutual fund expenses and I find that its inability to process “soft information” makes the Morningstar Quantitative Rating™ much less useful than the Morningstar Analyst Rating™. I also examine the relationship between Morningstar Quantitative Rating™ and mutual fund flows and find that the “robo‐rater” has little to no influence on investors' choice of mutual funds.

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