The three essays of my dissertation are in the asset pricing area. The first essay is on the topic of how the popularity of ETFs affects active mutual funds. The second essay is about individuals' risk preferences and how early childhood experience can shape one's risk preference. The third essay is on whether active managers' education can affect their skills. Recently, the media frequently quotes active managers who claim that ETFs impede their ability of generating prots. They argue that ETFs are draining liquidity from the market and making it harder for them to generate alphas. However, a recent paper by Ben-David et al.(2018) argues that ETFs generate new inefficiencies into the underlying stocks in ETFs. Thus the popularity of ETFs should provide more opportunities for active managers to generate alpha. My first essay find that the popularity of ETFs prompts active mutual fund managers to conduct more informed trades that generate alphas. Specifically, the trades of skilled active managers better predict the future performance of stocks after the passive ownership in those stocks increase. This paper directly addresses the question of whether ETF ownership affects market efficiency by considering new inefficiencies caused by passive ETFs and whether those inefficiencies create arbitrage opportunities for active mutual funds. The second essay (co-authored) studies how our early childhood interactions with parents shape our risk preferences. Specifically, recent literature argues that only the more recent macro-economic experiences matters in shaping our risk-taking behaviors (Malmendier and Nagel, 2011), which indicates that one's earlier childhood experience is not important. Using an IV setting, we find that parents' risk-taking positively affects children's risk-taking. More importantly, exploiting a finding that parents spend more quality time with their first child, we find that this effect we identified comes mainly from one's childhood interaction with her parents, confirming a nurturing channel. This parental effect doesn't fade away with time/when children move away from parents. The third essay looks at how a mutual fund manager's early personal experience, education, affects her skills to generate performance. By showing active mutual fund managers perform better in industries that are related to their education major, this paper provides evidence that active managers have skills in those industries that they have expertise in. The first essay focuses on the institutional investors; the second essay focuses on individual investors and their early experience; while the third essay links the first two by looking at one's early experience and how it affects institutional investors such as active fund managers.