Portfolio Manager Compensation in the U.S. Mutual Fund Industry

We study compensation contracts of individual portfolio managers using hand‐collected data of over 4,500 U.S. mutual funds. Variations in the compensation structures are broadly consistent with an optimal contracting equilibrium. The likelihood of explicit performance‐based incentives is positively correlated with the intensity of agency conflicts, as proxied by the advisor's clientele dispersion, its affiliations in the financial industry, and its ownership structure. Investor sophistication and the threat of dismissal in outsourced funds serve as substitutes for explicit performance‐based incentives. Finally, we find little evidence of differences in future performance associated with any particular compensation arrangement.     

美国共同基金的新发展

目前美国基金的平均规模远远高于全球的平均水平,今后的很长一段时间内,美国的基金业将依旧发挥重要的导向作用。     

Portfolio Manager Ownership and Mutual Fund Performance

This paper examines the association between a mutual fund manager's personal fund investment and mutual fund performance. From a data set of newly released managerial ownership disclosures, I find that fund ownership levels are diverse and, in many instances, quite large. Mutual fund returns are increasing in the level of managerial investment, consistent with personal ownership realigning decision-maker and shareholder interests. Also consistent with the reduction of agency costs, I find that managerial ownership is inversely related to fund turnover. However, there is no evidence of an association between managerial ownership and a mutual fund's tax burden.     

Herding in the German Mutual Fund Industry

This paper analyses the trading activity of German mutual funds in the 1998–2002 period to investigate whether German mutual fund managers are engaged in herding behaviour. Another objective of the study is to determine the impact of this herd‐like trading on stock prices. Our results provide evidence of herding and positive feedback trading by German mutual fund managers. We show that a significant portion of herding detected in the German market is associated with spurious herding as a consequence of changes in benchmark index composition. Investigating the impact of mutual fund herding on stock prices, we find that herding seems to neither destabilise nor stabilise stock prices.     

美国封闭式基金的发展和对我国的启示

不管是封闭式基金的哪种结局，都应该按照市场法规和基金持有人的意见来决定封闭式基金的命运。     

公司型基金:中国基金业发展的战略选择

公司型基金现已成为世界基金组织模式的主流形式，而我国到目前为止全是单一的契约型基金。相对于契约型基金的固有缺陷而言，公司型基金有契约型基金无可比拟的制度优势。基于此，公司型基金应该成为我国未来基金业发展的主要政策取向。为此，必须在法律上明确界定公司型基金的法律性质以及处理好公司型基金与契约型基金的税负均衡问题。     

The Relation between Price and Performance in the Mutual Fund Industry

Gruber (1996) drew attention to the puzzle that investors buy actively managed equity mutual funds, even though on average such funds underperform index funds. We uncover another puzzling fact about the market for equity mutual funds: Funds with worse before-fee performance charge higher fees. This negative relation between fees and performance is robust and can be explained as the outcome of strategic fee-setting by mutual funds in the presence of investors with different degrees of sensitivity to performance. We also find some evidence that better fund governance may bring fees more in line with performance.     

Outsourcing in the International Mutual Fund Industry: An Equilibrium View

We study outsourcing relationships among international asset management firms. We find that, in companies that manage both outsourced and in‐house funds, in‐house funds outperform outsourced funds by 0.85% annually (57% of the expense ratio). We attribute this result to preferential treatment of in‐house funds via the preferential allocation of IPOs, trading opportunities, and cross‐trades, especially at times when in‐house funds face steep outflows and require liquidity. We explain preferential treatment with agency problems: it increases with the subcontractor's market power and the difficulty of monitoring the subcontractor, and decreases with the subcontractor's amount of parallel in‐house activity.     

The Size and Structure of the World Mutual Fund Industry

This paper analyses the mutual fund industry for 20 countries using a new database of more than 50,000 mutual funds. The results suggest that more developed industries provide more benefits to investors as they diversify more internationally, charge lower annual charges and present more product sophistication. The results also have important policy implications by emphasising the role of competition and contestability in industry development. Fewer barriers to entry are positively associated with a larger industry, and concomitantly with more efficiency in terms of returns and fees.     

CEO Turnover and Ownership Structure: Evidence From the U.S. Property–Liability Insurance Industry

This article examines the impact of ownership structure on the relation between firm performance and chief executive officer (CEO) turnover in the U.S. property–liability insurance industry. Theoretical implications of stock versus mutual ownership structures on the performance–turnover relation are ambiguous. Our empirical results indicate that CEO turnover is less responsive to firm underwriting performance in mutual insurers compared to stock insurers. In fact, we find that while CEO turnover for stock firms is negatively related to prior performance, no such relationship is found for mutual insurers. These results hold while controlling for board structure and other relevant factors.     

Hedging and Value in the U.S. Airline Industry

This article discusses the findings and practical import of the authors' study of the fuel hedging activity of 28 U.S. airlines during the period 1992‐2003. The aim of the study was to answer the following question: Does fuel hedging add value to the airlines and, if so, how? The airline industry provides a natural experiment for investigating the relation between hedging and value for a number of reasons: (1) the industry is by and large competitive and remarkably homogeneous; (2) airlines are exposed to a single, volatile input commodity—jet fuel—that represents a major economic expense for all competitors; and (3) fuel price increases cannot be easily passed through to customers because of competitive pressures in the industry. The results of the study show that jet fuel hedging is positively related to airline firm value. Those airlines that hedged their fuel costs had Tobin's Q ratios that were 5‐10% higher, on average, than those of airlines that did not hedge. What's more, the higher the proportion of future fuel requirements hedged, the larger the valuation premium. The authors' results also suggest that the main source of value added by hedging in the airline industry is its role in preserving the firm's ability to take advantage of investment opportunities that arise when fuel prices are high and airline operating cash fl ows and values are down. Consistent with this argument, the study finds that the value premium associated with hedging increases with the level of the firm's capital spending. The authors also report that the most active hedgers of fuel costs among the airlines are the larger firms with the least debt and highest credit ratings. This result is somewhat surprising, at least to the extent that smaller airlines are expected to have larger financial distress costs (as a percentage of firm value) and hence greater motive to hedge. One explanation is that the smaller airlines have lacked either sufficient resources or the strategic foresight to acquire a derivatives hedging capability. A second possibility—one that is consistent with the study's main findings—is that the largest airlines also have the highest costs of financial distress (even as a percentage of firm value) in the form of larger growth opportunities that could be lost as a result of high leverage and financial risk. In other words, only the largest airlines are typically able to buy distressed assets during periods of industry weakness; to the extent this is so, such firms may also have the most to gain from hedging.     

Business Networks, Corporate Governance, and Contracting in the Mutual Fund Industry

Business connections can mitigate agency conflicts by facilitating efficient information transfers, but can also be channels for inefficient favoritism. I analyze these two effects in the mutual fund industry and find that fund directors and advisory firms that manage the funds hire each other preferentially based on the intensity of their past interactions. I do not find evidence that stronger board-advisor ties correspond to better or worse outcomes for fund shareholders. These results suggest that the two effects of board-management connections on investor welfare—improved monitoring and increased potential for collusion—balance out in this setting.     

Geographic Deregulation and Competition in the U.S. Banking Industry

We examine the effects of geographic deregulation on state‐level competition in U.S. banking markets over the period 1976‐2005. The empirical results confirm that the U.S. banks in general operated under monopolistic competition during the period examined. After partitioning the sample based on bank size we find that the market competition for large banks in Delaware, Oregon, and Rhode Island can be characterized as monopolistic while small banks in Arizona and Massachusetts seem to have operated under the conditions of perfect competition. The removal of geographic restrictions appears to have very limited and non‐uniform effect on state‐level competitive conduct. There is some evidence that the U.S. banking industry might have actually experienced a less competitive behavior in recent years due to increased market power of larger banks.     

美国金融业复苏中的失衡

2009年第二季度以来,美国金融市场出现意外并令人振奋的"V"形反弹.然而深入考察可以发现,美国金融业的发展同时也出现了不和谐状态:市场之间、机构之间、市场和机构之间的发展反差扩大.金融市场和金融机构康复状况及前景更加扑朔迷离.     

Risk-taking behavior in the U.S. thrift industry: Ownership structure and regulatory changes

We examine the relationship between U.S. thrift institution ownership structure and risk taking along with the impact of the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989 (FIRREA) on this relationship. Our results, based on various indicators of risk, suggest that insider controlled thrifts were more likely to engage in risk taking prior to 1989 than were diversely held institutions. FIRREA seems to have curtailed much of this risk taking. We find inverse relationships between risk-taking and levels of institutional shareholdings. This along with other evidence suggests that the motive for risk-taking was not maximization of the ‘option’ value of shares as has been reported elsewhere. We also find evidence that entrenched managers may have generated significant private benefits.     

Effectiveness of Severance Tax Incentives in the U.S. Oil Industry

This paper develops a dynamic empirical framework that can be used to test the effectiveness of state-level severance tax incentives in the U.S. oil industry. The framework embeds U.S. state-level panel data estimates into Pindyck's (1978) widely received theoretical model of exhaustible resource supply and can be applied to any of 20 states that produce significant quantities of oil. The model allows for interactions between taxes levied by different levels of government and for the first time addresses potential interstate differences in exploration costs, extraction costs, and reserve additions. In general, results show that severance tax incentives (in the form of tax rate reductions) substantially reduce state tax revenue collected, but yield moderate to little change in oil drilling and production activity. This outcome suggests that states should be wary of arguments asserting that large swings in oil field activity can be obtained from changes in severance tax rates.     

Of Tournaments and Temptations: An Analysis of Managerial Incentives in the Mutual Fund Industry

We test the hypothesis that when their compensation is linked to relative performance, managers of investment portfolios likely to end up as “losers” will manipulate fund risk differently than those managing portfolios likely to be “winners.” An empirical investigation of the performance of 334 growth-oriented mutual funds during 1976 to 1991 demonstrates that mid-year losers tend to increase fund volatility in the latter part of an annual assessment period to a greater extent than mid-year winners. Furthermore, we show that this effect became stronger as industry growth and investor awareness of fund performance increased over time.     

XBRL、代理成本与绩效水平——基于中国开放式基金市场的证据

从2010年开始,中国证监会强制要求所有基金公司采用XBRL在唯一指定的官方网站上披露年报等信息,同时提供在线XBRL阅读器以方便投资者查阅相关信息。基于此,本文考察XBRL的采用对于开放式基金代理成本及其相关经济后果的影响,研究发现,强制采用XBRL,降低了开放式基金的代理成本,同时提升了开放式基金的绩效水平。研究表明这一新的披露方式,减少了投资者的信息搜索成本以及投资者与基金经理之间的信息不对称,从而促进了投资者作为委托人对于代理人行为的有效监督。