The Determinants of the Intermediary Spread: Evidence from Australian, UK and USA-based International Equity Funds

This paper develops and tests a new measure of mutual fund performance, based on Brennan's (1993a) equilibrium model of the pricing of retail financial products, which assumes that search costs of investors are non-trivial and cause the demand for mutual funds to be inelastic, thus creating an intermediary spread. This implies that the marginal costs of the intermediary spread in the form of expenses and sales load must be explicitly traded off against the marginal benefits in terms of the fund's return relative to a benchmark. The measure is used to evaluate the performance of twelve USA, eight UK and five Australian-based internationally diversified equity funds over the period 1982–95, and provides new insights into their performance in ways that are not revealed by the Jensen measure.