Performance of Enhanced Index and Quantitative Equity Funds

We examine the performance of enhanced index and quantitative equity funds. Both types of funds use quantitative models in investment selection. Enhanced index funds set an explicit objective to outperform a benchmark index. Proponents of quantitative funds argue that their management style takes human emotions out of the investment decision‐making process and leads to more objective stock selection. We find evidence of outperformance by quantitatively managed growth funds, especially those investing in small cap stocks.     

The risk in hedge fund strategies: Theory and evidence from long/short equity hedge funds

Theory suggests that long/short equity hedge funds' returns come from directional as well as spread bets on the stock market. Empirical analysis finds persistent net exposures to the spread between small vs large cap stocks in addition to the overall market. Together, these factors account for more than 80% of return variation. Additional factors are price momentum and market activity. Combining two major branches of hedge fund research, our model is the first that explicitly incorporates the effect of funding (stock loan) on alpha. Using a comprehensive dataset compiled from three major database sources, we find that among the three thousand plus hedge funds with similar style classification, less than 20% of long/short equity hedge funds delivered significant, persistent, stable positive non-factor related returns. Consistent with the predictions of the Berk and Green (2004) model we find alpha producing funds decays to “beta-only” over time. However, we do not find evidence of a negative effect of fund size on managers' ability to deliver alpha. Finally, we show that non-factor related returns, or alpha, are positively correlated to market activity and negatively correlated to aggregate short interest. In contrast, equity mutual funds and long-bias equity hedge funds have no significant, persistent, non-factor related return. Expressed differently, L/S equity hedge funds, as the name suggests, do benefit from shorting. Besides differences in risk taking behavior, this is a key feature distinguishing L/S funds from long-bias funds.     

False Discoveries in UK Mutual Fund Performance

We use a multiple hypothesis testing framework to estimate the false discovery rate (FDR) amongst UK equity mutual funds. Using all funds, we find a relatively high FDR for the best funds of 32.8% (at a 5% significance level), which implies that only around 3.7% of all funds truly outperform their benchmarks. For the worst funds the FDR is relatively small at 7.6% which results in 22% of funds which truly underperform their benchmarks. For different investment styles, this pattern of very few genuine winner funds is repeated for all companies, small companies and equity income funds. Forming portfolios of funds recursively for which the FDR is controlled at a ‘acceptable’ value, produces no performance persistence for positive alpha funds and weak evidence of persistence for negative alpha funds.     

CEO Compensation and Firm Performance: an Empirical Investigation of UK Panel Data

This paper examines the link between CEO pay and performance employing a unique, hand‐collected panel data set of 390 UK non‐financial firms from the FTSE All Share Index for the period 1999–2005. We include both cash (salary and bonus) and equity‐based (stock options and long‐term incentive plans) components of CEO compensation, and CEO wealth based on share holdings, stock option and stock awards holdings in our analysis. In addition, we control for a comprehensive set of corporate governance variables. The empirical results show that in comparison to the previous findings for US CEOs, pay‐performance elasticity for UK CEOs seems to be lower; pay‐performance elasticity for UK CEOs is 0.075 (0.095) for cash compensation (total direct compensation), indicating that a ten percentage increase in shareholder return corresponds to an increase of 0.75% (0.95%) in cash (total direct) compensation. We also find that both the median share holdings and stock‐based pay‐performance sensitivity are lower for UK CEOs when we compare our findings with the previous findings for US CEOs. Thus, our results suggest that corporate governance reports in the UK, such as the Greenbury Report (1995) that proposed CEO compensation be more closely linked to performance, have not been totally effective. Our findings also indicate that institutional ownership has a positive and significant influence on CEO pay‐performance sensitivity of option grants. Finally, we find that longer CEO tenure is associated with lower pay‐performance sensitivity of option grants suggesting the entrenchment effect of CEO tenure.     

Mutual Fund Performance: Measurement and Evidence1

The paper provides a critical review of empirical findings on the performance of mutual funds, mainly for the US and UK. Ex‐post, there are around 0‐5% of top performing UK and US equity mutual funds with truly positive‐alpha performance (after fees) and around 20% of funds that have truly poor alpha performance, with about 75% of active funds which are effectively zero‐alpha funds. Key drivers of relative performance are, load fees, expenses and turnover. There is little evidence of successful market timing. Evidence suggests past winner funds persist, when rebalancing is frequent (i.e., less than one year) and when using sophisticated sorting rules (e.g., Bayesian approaches) ‐ but transactions costs (load and advisory fees) imply that economic gains to investors from winner funds may be marginal. The US evidence clearly supports the view that past loser funds remain losers. Broadly speaking results for bond mutual funds are similar to those for equity funds. Sensible advice for most investors would be to hold low cost index funds and avoid holding past ‘active’ loser funds. Only sophisticated investors should pursue an active ex‐ante investment strategy of trying to pick winners ‐ and then with much caution.     

A Conditional Assessment of the Relationships between the Major World Bond Markets

This paper uses a bivariate GARCH framework to examine the lead‐lag relations and the conditional correlations between 10‐year US government bond returns and their counterparts from the UK, Germany, and Japan. We find that while mean and volatility spillovers exist between the major international bond markets, they are much weaker than those between equity markets. The results also indicate that the correlations between the US and other major bond market returns are time varying and are driven by changing macroeconomic and market conditions. However, in contrast to the finding that the benefits of international diversification in equity markets evaporate during high‐stress periods, we find that the benefits of diversification across major government bond markets do not decrease during periods of extremely high bond market volatility or following extremely negative US and foreign bond returns.     

An Analysis of Changes in Board Structure during Corporate Governance Reforms

This study examines the evolution of company board structure during a period of corporate governance reform. Using data over a time period following the publication of the Cadbury Report (1992) we present evidence of an increase in the independence of UK boards, as measured by an increased willingness to employ independent non‐executive directors, and to separate the positions of the CEO and the Chairman of the Board. In examining the determinants of these changes, we find that boards change more readily in response to changes in managerial control, equity issuance and corporate performance than changes in the firm‐specific operating environment of companies.     

Bad beta good beta,state‐space news decomposition and the cross‐section of stock returns

This study employs an innovative market‐based approach, where return on equity (ROE) is employed as a proxy for cash‐flow news and a state‐space model is used for market news decomposition. We document that the bad beta good beta (BBGB) model of Campbell and Vuolteenaho (2004) explains about 30 per cent of the cross‐sectional variations in US stock returns. We also find that the BBGB model adequately explains the size effect leading to its superior performance in this area. Our method controls for the news decomposition method and market news proxies’ bias. We contribute to the literature by providing an alternative easy‐to‐implement and consistent market‐based method for news decomposition.     

The Impact of Corporate Governance on Closed‐end Funds

This study uses a large sample of UK‐listed closed‐end funds to examine whether governance has an impact on two indicators of fund performance: the level of fund‐management fees and the discount at which a fund trades. Fees are under the control of the directors, and we find that they are inversely related to fund returns, even after allowing for differences across investment sectors. Fees are, on average, higher if a fund has a large board, few directors from outside the fund‐family, many directors from within the fund‐family, and low ownership by the management company. Discounts for funds are wider if the management company or any blockholder has a significant long‐term stake, suggesting that investors are wary of entrenched management. The results suggest that boards are frequently compromised in their duty to shareholders by their dependence on fund‐management companies.     

Sustainable mutual fund performance and flow in the recent years through the COVID-19 pandemic

Sustainable investing has gained significant momentum over the past few years. In this paper, we study the performance and flows of sustainable equity mutual funds in recent years through the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that the high-sustainable funds perform better than the low-sustainable ones by between 1.32% and 6.96% annually. This outperformance significantly increases during the COVID-19 pandemic-induced market crash and the post-crash pandemic. Similarly, we find that high-sustainable funds attract significantly more investments (or suffer less outflow) than the low-sustainable funds by between 5.28% and 5.76% per annum. These flow differences increase considerably during the market crash, consistent with the ‘flight-to-quality’ effect. We also find that the high-sustainable funds attract significantly more investment during the post-crash pandemic than before the crash. This suggests that investors consider sustainable investing a necessity (not a luxury good), and their taste/attitude towards sustainable investing has changed – now they prioritize ‘investing with a conscience.’     

THE OVERNIGHT AND DAILY TRANSMISSION OF STOCK INDEX FUTURES PRICES BETWEEN MAJOR INTERNATIONAL MARKETS

Stock index futures prices for the world's major equity markets, Japan, the UK and the US, are used to examine the interaction of international equity markets. By using stock index futures prices, we avoid the nonsynchronous data problem inherent with opening and closing market averages. We find that the US is the dominant world market; overnight returns in Japan and the UK are greatly influenced by the US daily returns. In contrast, the Japanese market has no impact on the overnight or daily returns in the UK, while the UK daily performance has a small influence on Japanese overnight returns. Slight evidence of over-reaction at the opening of Japanese futures exists as the daily Nikkei returns are negatively related to the US returns.     

Regime Change and the Role of International Markets on the Stock Returns of Small Open Economies

We examine the influence of US, UK and German macroeconomic and financial variables on the stock returns of two relatively small, open European economies, Ireland and Denmark. Within a nonlinear framework, we allow for time variation via regime switching using a smooth transition regression (STR) model. We find that US (global) and UK and German (regional) stock returns are significant determinants of returns in both markets. Further, global information represented by oil and US asset price movements drive changes between states in each market. Significantly, the role of country‐specific domestic variables is typically confined to a single state while global and regional variables pervade all states.     

The Market Timing Ability of UK Mutual Funds

Abstract:  We apply a recent nonparametric methodology to test the market timing skills of UK equity and balanced mutual funds. The methodology has a number of advantages over the widely used regression based tests of Treynor-Mazuy (1966) and Henriksson-Merton (1981) . We find a relatively small number of funds (around 1%) demonstrate positive market timing ability at a 5% significance level while around 19% of funds exhibit negative timing and on average funds miss-time the market. However, controlling for publicly available information we find very little evidence of market timing ability based on private timing signals. In terms of investment styles, there are a small number of successful positive market timers amongst Equity Income and 'All Company' funds but not among either Small Stock funds or Balanced funds, although a few small stock funds are found to time a small stock index rather than a broad market index.     

European Mutual Fund Performance

This paper presents an overview of the European mutual fund industry and investigates mutual fund performance using a survivorship bias controlled sample of 506 funds from the five most important mutual fund countries. The latter is done using the Carhart (1997) 4-factor asset-pricing model. In addition we investigate whether European fund managers exhibit 'hot hands', persistence in performance. Finally the influence of fund characteristics on risk-adjusted performance is considered. Our overall results suggest that European mutual funds, and especially small cap funds are able to add value, as indicated by their positive after cost alphas. If we add back management fees, four out of five countries exhibit significant out-performance at an aggregate level. Finally, we detect strong persistence in mean returns for funds investing in the UK. Our results deviate from most US studies that argue mutual funds under-perform the market by the amount of expenses they charge.     

UK mutual fund performance: Skill or luck?

Using a comprehensive data set on (surviving and non-surviving) UK equity mutual funds, we use a cross-section bootstrap methodology to distinguish between ‘skill’ and ‘luck’ for individual funds. This methodology allows for non-normality in the idiosyncratic risk of the funds — a major issue when considering those funds which appear to be either very good or very bad performers, since these are the funds which investors are primarily interested in identifying. Our study points to the existence of stock picking ability among a relatively small number of top performing UK equity mutual funds (i.e. performance which is not solely due to good luck). At the negative end of the performance scale, our analysis strongly rejects the hypothesis that most poor performing funds are merely unlucky. Most of these funds demonstrate ‘bad skill’. Recursive estimation and Kalman ‘smoothed’ coefficients indicate temporal stability in the ex-post performance alpha's of winner and loser portfolios. We also find performance persistence amongst loser but not amongst winner funds.     

The Return to Direct Investment in Private Firms: New Evidence on the Private Equity Premium Puzzle*

This paper uses a novel dataset to analyze the return to direct investments in private firms by pension funds. We have two key findings. First, direct investments in private firms have underperformed public equity by 392 basis points per annum under conservative risk adjustments. Second, initial mispricing, due to over‐optimism or misperceived risk, and subsequent low capital gains seem to explain the gap in returns to private firms. Overall, these findings complement the finding of Moskowitz and Vissing‐Jørgensen (2002) of low returns on entrepreneurial investments and provide new insight into the existence of what they call the private equity premium puzzle: Even professional investors with well‐diversified portfolios like pension funds seem to get a poor risk‐return tradeoff from investing directly in private firms.     

Exits,Performance, and Late Stage Private Equity: the Case of UK Management Buy‐outs

Using a hand‐collected dataset of 1,225 buy‐outs, we examine post buy‐out and post exit long term abnormal operating performance of UK management buy‐outs, during the period 1980–2009. Our univariate and panel data analysis of post buy‐out performance conclusively show positive changes in output. We also find strong evidence for improvements in employment and output and a lack of significant changes in efficiency and profitability following initial public offerings (IPO) exits. IPOs from the main London Stock Exchange (LSE) market outperform their counterparts from the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) only in terms of changes in output. For secondary management buy outs (SMBOs), performance declines during the first buy‐out but in the second buy‐out performance stabilises until year three, after which profitability and efficiency fall while employment increases. Although private equity (PE) backed buy‐outs do not exhibit either post buy‐out or post exit underperformance, they fail to over‐perform their non‐PE backed counterparts. In the subsample of buy‐outs exiting via IPOs on the AIM, PE firms do not outperform non‐PE buy‐outs. Our findings highlight the importance of tracing the overall performance of buy‐outs over a longer period and controlling for sample selection bias related to the provision of PE backing.     

Have European Stocks become More Volatile? An Empirical Investigation of Idiosyncratic and Market Risk in the Euro Area

We examine the dynamics of idiosyncratic risk, market risk and return correlations in European equity markets using weekly observations from 3515 stocks listed in the 12 euro area stock markets over the period 1974–2004. Similarly to Campbell et al. (2001) , we find a rise in idiosyncratic volatility, implying that it now takes more stocks to diversify away idiosyncratic risk. Contrary to the US, however, market risk is trended upwards in Europe and correlations are not trended downwards. Both the volatility and correlation measures are pro‐cyclical, and they rise during times of low market returns. Market and average idiosyncratic volatility jointly predict market wide returns, and the latter impact upon both market and idiosyncratic volatility. This has asset pricing and risk management implications.     

Market and Model Credit Default Swap Spreads: Mind the Gap!

Structural models of default establish a relation across the fair values of various asset classes (equity, bonds, credit derivatives) referring to the same company. In most circumstances such relation is verified in practice, as different financial assets tend to move in the same direction at similar speed. However, occasional deviations from the theoretical fair values occur, especially in times of financial turmoil. Understanding how the dynamics of the theoretical fair values of various assets compares to that of their market values is crucial to a number of market participants. This paper investigates whether a popular structural model, the CreditGrades approach proposed by Finger (2002) , Stamicar and Finger (2005) , succeeds in explaining the dynamic relation between equity/option variables and Credit Default Swap (CDS) premia at individual company level. We find that CDS model spreads display a significant correlation with CDS market spreads. However, the gap between the two is time varying and widens substantially in times of financial turbulence. The analysis of the gap dynamics reveals that this is partly due to episodes of decoupling between equity and credit markets, and partly due to shortcomings of the model. Finally, we observe that model spreads tend to predict market spreads.     

Performance,stock selection and market timing of the German equity mutual fund industry

We investigate the performance of the German equity mutual fund industry over 20 years (monthly data 1990–2009) using the false discovery rate (FDR) to examine both model selection and performance measurement. When using the Fama–French three factor (3F) model (with no market timing) we find that at most 0.5% of funds have truly positive alpha-performance and about 27% have truly negative-alpha performance. However, the use of the FDR in model selection implies inclusion of market timing variables and this results in a large increase in truly positive alpha funds. However, when we use a measure of “total” performance, which includes the contribution of both security selection (alpha) and market timing, we obtain results similar to the 3F model. These results are largely invariant to different sample periods, alternative factor models and to the performance of funds investing in German and non-German firms — the latter casts doubt on the ‘home-bias’ hypothesis of superior performance in ‘local’ markets.