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.     

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.     

Outsourcing Mutual Fund Management: Firm Boundaries,Incentives, and Performance

We investigate the effects of managerial outsourcing on the performance and incentives of mutual funds. Fund families outsource the management of a large fraction of their funds to advisory firms. These funds underperform those run internally by about 52 basis points per year. After instrumenting for a fund's outsourcing status, the estimated underperformance is three times larger. We hypothesize that contractual externalities due to firm boundaries make it difficult to extract performance from an outsourced relationship. Consistent with this view, outsourced funds face higher powered incentives; they are more likely to be closed after poor performance and excessive risk‐taking.     

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。     

Mutual Fund Investment in Emerging Markets: An Overview

International mutual funds are key contributors to the globalizationof financial markets and one of the main sources of capitalflows to emerging economies. Despite their importance in emergingmarkets, little is known about their investment allocation andstrategies. This article provides an overview of mutual fundactivity in emerging markets. It describes their size, assetallocation, and country allocation and then focuses on theirbehavior during crises in emerging markets in the 1990s. Itanalyzes data at both the fund-manager and fund-investor levels.Due to large redemptions and injections, funds' flows are notstable. Withdrawals from emerging markets during recent criseswere large, which is consistent with the evidence on financialcontagion.     

Mutual Fund Advisory Contracts: An Empirical Investigation

We investigate marginal compensation rates in mutual fund advisory contracts and find the following. Equity and foreign fund advisors receive higher marginal compensation than debt and domestic fund advisors. Advisors of funds with greater turnover receive higher marginal compensation. Also, closed-end fund advisors receive higher marginal compensation than open-end fund advisors. Finally, we find that marginal compensation is lower for advisors of large funds and members of large fund families. We argue that these differences in marginal compensation reflect differences in advisor marginal product, differences in the difficulty of monitoring performance, differences in control environments, and scale economies.     

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.     

从委托-代理理论看基金利益输送问题

本文认为在基金运作中存在典型的委托一代理关系,据此作者建立了一个三阶段的模型,指出正是在激励约束方面存在的不足导致了这一问题的出现,并具体提出了相关改进措施.     

International Equity Asset Classes in the Turkish Fund Industry

We examine Turkish fund portfolios and identify the role of international investments in their formation. We find that (1) Turkish funds hold a very small fraction of international assets during 1987-2008, (2) the weight of international equity in the funds with an international mandate is smaller than the total weight of domestic asset classes as of 2009, and (3) international stock holdings of Turkish portfolio managers show significant similarity, which can be explained by the fact that the managers tend to hold stocks with which they are familiar. We compare the performance of funds that have the international investment objective with benchmark portfolios and provide suggestions for more diverse funds in the Turkish fund industry.     

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。     

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.     

Mutual Fund Family Size and Mutual Fund Performance: The Role of Regulatory Changes

We examine whether the previously documented positive association between fund family size and fund performance is affected by significant regulatory changes (i.e., Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD), the Global Settlement (GS), and increased scrutiny as a result of trading scandals) that have occurred in the last decade. Using Reg FD as a beginning point for these structural changes, we find that, while fund family size was positively associated with fund performance in the period prior to the regulatory changes, this advantage is significantly weaker in the period subsequent to the regulatory changes. Consistent with the weakened advantage of fund family size in fund performance, we find that the greater stock‐picking skill of larger fund families, measured using the earnings announcement returns of the stocks they trade, also weakened subsequent to the regulatory changes. Using narrower event windows around the regulatory changes, we find that the previously documented superior return of large fund families was partly attributable to selective disclosure. We also find that fund families implicated in the trading scandals experienced a decline in their performance during the scandal period. Finally, we examine the role of large investment banks in providing an advantage to large fund families. Family size was positively associated with the extent to which funds traded in the same direction as forecast revisions by analysts from large investment banks in the period prior to Reg FD and the GS and this association declined significantly after the two regulatory events.     

An Intertemporal CAPM Approach to Evaluate Mutual Fund Performance

Merton (1973) and Campbell (1993) have demonstrated that if an investor anticipates information shifts, he will adjust his portfolio choice today in an attempt to hedge these shifts. Exploiting these insights, we construct a new performance measure to evaluate fund managers' hedging ability. This new measure is different from two widely adopted performance evaluation measures: securities selectivity and market timing. Moreover, an econometric methodology is developed to simultaneously estimate the magnitudes of these three portfolio performance evaluation measures. The results show that mutual fund managers are on average with positive security selection and negative market timing ability. Furthermore, the mutual funds with investment style classified as Asset Allocation generally have positive hedging timing ability.     

Mutual Fund Performance: Evidence from the UK

This paper uses a large sample containing the complete return histories of 2300 UK open-ended mutual funds over a 23-year period to measure fund performance. We find some evidence of underperformance on a risk-adjusted basis by the average fund manager, persistence of performance and the existence of a substantial survivor bias. Similar findings have been reported for US equity mutual funds. New findings not previously documented for other markets include evidence that mutual fund performance varies substantially across different asset categories, especially foreign asset categories. We also identify some new patterns in performance related to the funds' distance from their inception and termination dates: underperformance intensifies as the fund termination date approaches, while, in contrast, there is some evidence that funds (weakly) outperform during their first year of existence.     

Truth in Mutual Fund Advertising: Evidence on Future Performance and Fund Flows

We examine a sample of 294 mutual funds that are advertised in Barron's or Money magazine. The preadvertisement performance of these funds is significantly higher than that of the benchmarks. We test whether the sponsors select funds to signal continued superior performance or they use the past superior performance to attract more money into the funds. Our analysis shows that there is no superior performance in the postadvertisement period. Thus, the results do not support the signaling hypothesis. On the other hand, we find that the advertised funds attract significantly more money in comparison with a group of control funds.     

Short-Term Persistence in Mutual Fund Performance

We estimate parameters of standard stock selection and markettiming models using daily mutual fund returns and quarterlymeasurement periods. We then rank funds quarterly by abnormalreturn and measure the performance of each decile the followingquarter. The average abnormal return of the top decile in thepost-ranking quarter is 39 basis points. The post-ranking abnormalreturn disappears when funds are evaluated over longer periods.These results suggest that superior performance is a short-livedphenomenon that is observable only when funds are evaluatedseveral times a year.     

俱乐部机制下的企业互助金:邹平案例

基于信息对称、合作与会费制度的邹平市企业互助金组织,是一种非政府主导的俱乐部性质的制度安排,它在防范逆向选择风险、化解会员企业债务链风险等方面更具市场持续性和效率优势,其成功的运作,有效缓解了当地中小企业的信贷断点难题。     

美国投资基金业结构：演变与启示

美国ICI将共同基金划分为股票基金、混合基金、债券基金和货币市场基金四大类型。以各类基金占基金资产总额比例为指标的基金产品结构一直在不断地发生变化。