An empirical analysis of the dynamic relationship between mutual fund flow and market return volatility

We study the dynamic relation between aggregate mutual fund flow and market-wide volatility. Using daily flow data and a VAR approach, we find that market volatility is negatively related to concurrent and lagged flow. A structural VAR impulse response analysis suggests that shock in flow has a negative impact on market volatility: An inflow (outflow) shock predicts a decline (an increase) in volatility. From the perspective of volatility–flow relation, we find evidence of volatility timing for recent period of 1998–2003. Finally, we document a differential impact of daily inflow versus outflow on intraday volatility. The relation between intraday volatility and inflow (outflow) becomes weaker (stronger) from morning to afternoon.     

Dividend distributions and closed-end fund discounts

Empirical support for the hypothesis that closed-end fund discounts are related to overhanging tax liabilities has been mixed. We introduce a new approach to testing this hypothesis by examining changes in discount levels following distributions of dividends and capital gains. Since distributions reduce future shareholder tax liabilities, the tax liability hypothesis implies that closed-end fund discounts should decline following distributions. Focusing on changes in discounts isolates this tax effect by eliminating the impact of other fund-specific factors on discount levels. Our results support the tax liability hypothesis, showing that short-run fluctuations in discounts are directly affected by taxable distributions.     

Analyst forecasts and European mutual fund trading

This paper addresses the questions whether European mutual fund managers rely on sell-side analyst information and whether this behavior impacts fund performance. Results show that mutual funds significantly increase (decrease) their holdings in stocks when any of the consensus forecast measures increases (decreases) within the quarter prior to the observation period. Furthermore, mutual fund managers primarily attribute high information value to consensus forecast revisions that contain positive information, that are based on a sufficiently high number of inputs, and with more unanimous inputs to the consensus. Finally, following sell-side research seems to be beneficial for mutual fund managers since our results show that stock trades that are in line with analyst forecast revisions significantly outperform trades that are contrary to analyst research.     

Limited participation and the closed-end fund discount

In this paper, we present economic forces that affect the closed-end fund share price using a simple two-period model with limited participation. We characterize three economic forces: management fee, principal-agent problem effect and diversification benefit effect. The role of the management fee is consistent with recent studies by Ross [Ross S., 2002. Neoclassical finance, alternative finance and the closed end fund puzzle. European Financial Management 8, 129–137, Ross, S., 2002. A neoclassical look at behavioral finance: closed end funds. The Princeton lectures in finance III] and findings of various empirical studies [e.g., Kumar, R., Noronha, G.M., 1992. A re-examination of the relationship between closed-end fund discounts and expenses. Journal of Financial Research 15(2) Summer, 139–147; Russel, P.S., 2005. Closed-end fund pricing: The puzzle, the explanations, and some new evidence, Journal of Business and Economic Studies 11(1), 34–49; Gemmill, G., Thomas, D.C., 2002. Noise trading, costly arbitrage, and asset prices: Evidence from closed end funds. Journal of Finance 57(6), 2571–2594]. The model’s principal-agent problem effect is consistent with empirical findings by Brickley et al. [Brickley, James, Steven Manaster, Schallheim, James, 1991. The tax-timing option and the discounts on closed-end investment companies. Journal of Business 64, 287–312] of positive relation between the fund discount and the average variance of the constituent assets in the fund portfolio. In addition, it provides a theoretical framework for empirical studies, which examine the role of agency costs [Barclay, Michael J., Clifford G. Holderness, Jeffrey Pontiff, 1993. Private benefits from block ownership and discounts on closed-end funds. Journal of Financial Economics 33, 263–291] and compensation contracts [Coles, J., Suay, J., Woodbury, D., 2000. Fund advisor compensation in closed-end funds. Journal of Finance 55 (3), 1385–1414; Deli, Daniel N., 2002. Mutual fund advisory contracts: An empirical Investigation. Journal of Finance 57(1), 109–133] on the behavior of fund managers and fund discounts. The model’s diversification benefit effect supports the result in [Bonser-Neal C., Brauer,G., Neal, R.., Wheatley, S., 1990. International investment restrictions and closed-end country fund prices. Journal of Finance 45, 523–547] that announcement of financial market liberalization is associated with a decrease in the fund premium. It also supports the findings of [Kumar, R., Noronha, G.M., 1992. A re-examination of the relationship between closed-end fund discounts and expenses. Journal of Financial Research 15(2) Summer, 139–147; Chay, J.B., Trzcinka, Charles A., 1999. Managerial performance and the cross-sectional pricing of closed-end funds. Journal of Financial Economics 52, 379–408] of a positive relation between current premium and the risk-adjusted return over the following year.     

The cross section of conditional mutual fund performance in European stock markets

This paper implements strategies that use macroeconomic variables to select European equity mutual funds, including Pan-European, country, and sector funds. We find that several macro-variables are useful in locating funds with future outperformance and that country-specific mutual funds provide the best opportunities for fund rotation strategies using macroeconomic information. Specifically, our baseline long-only strategies that exploit time-varying predictability provide four-factor alphas of 12–13% per year over the 1993–2008 period. Our study provides new evidence on the skills of local versus Pan-European asset managers, as well as how macroeconomic information can be used to locate and time these local fund manager skills.     

Mutual fund flows and investor returns: An empirical examination of fund investor timing ability

We examine the timing ability of mutual fund investors using cash flow data at the individual fund level. Over 1991–2004 equity fund investor timing decisions reduce fund investor average returns by 1.56% annually. Underperformance due to poor timing is greater in load funds and funds with relatively large risk-adjusted returns. In particular, the magnitude of investor underperformance due to poor timing largely offsets the risk-adjusted alpha gains offered by good-performing funds. Investors in both actively managed funds and index funds exhibit poor investment timing. We demonstrate that our empirical results are consistent with investor return-chasing behavior.     

Front-running of mutual fund fire-sales

We show that a real-time trading strategy which front-runs the anticipated forced sales by mutual funds experiencing extreme capital outflows generates an alpha of 0.5% per month during the 1990–2010 period. The abnormal return stems from selling pressure among stocks that are below the NYSE mean size and cannot be attributed to the arrival of public information. While the largest stocks also exhibit downward price pressure, their prices revert before the front-running strategy can detect it. The duration of the anticipated selling pressure has decreased from about a month in the 1990s to about two weeks in the most recent decade. Our results suggest that publicly available information of fund flows and holdings exposes mutual funds in distress to predatory trading.     

Reputation stretching in mutual fund starts

This study examines the role of reputation stretching in the context of mutual funds. We show that the reputation stretching strategy increases net fund inflows to new funds run by well-performing fund managers and yields a net increase of fund inflows to fund families. Reputable fund managers exhibit one-year performance persistence for managing new funds, which can help investors assess managers when selecting funds. We also find that the decrease in information asymmetry associated with managerial reputation benefits investors by leading to an increase in new fund returns in the short run, compared to those of new funds run by managers without track records. Overall, the reputation stretching strategy benefits both investors, by reducing information asymmetry and improving investment returns, and fund families, by increasing net fund inflows to new equity funds.     

Risk characteristics of closed-end stock fund IPOs

We examine 34 closed-end stock fund initial public offerings (IPOs) during the period of January 1, 1986, through June 30, 1987. We find that the funds have low systematic risk during their first trading months, especially the initial month. We also observe that the funds' beta risk tends to increase as the funds season in aftermarket trading. This pattern is in sharp contrast to new issues by nonfinancial corporations, which have very high initial betas that decline over time.     

Measuring investor sentiment with mutual fund flows

We investigate a proxy for monthly shifts between bond funds and equity funds in the USA: aggregate net exchanges of equity funds. This measure (which is negatively related to changes in VIX) is positively contemporaneously correlated with aggregate stock market excess returns: One standard deviation of net exchanges is related to 1.95% of market excess return. Our main new finding is that 85% (all) of the contemporaneous relation is reversed within four (ten) months. The effect is stronger in smaller stocks and in growth stocks. These findings support the notion of “noise” in aggregate market prices induced by investor sentiment.     

Cross-sectional learning and short-run persistence in mutual fund performance

Using monthly return data of more than 6400 US equity mutual funds we investigate short-run performance persistence over the period 1984–2003. We sort funds into rank portfolios based on past performance, and evaluate the portfolios’ out-of-sample performance. To cope with short ranking periods, we employ an empirical Bayes approach to measure past performance more efficiently. Our main finding is that when funds are sorted into decile portfolios based on 12-month ranking periods, the top decile of funds earns a statistically significant, abnormal return of 0.26 percent per month. This effect persists beyond load fees, and is mainly concentrated in relatively young, small cap/growth funds.     

Small-cap equity mutual fund managers as liquidity providers

This paper examines the relation between the performance of small-cap equity mutual funds and the liquidity characteristics of their asset holdings. We study the trading behavior of fund managers and show that on average, they tend to buy less liquid stocks and sell more liquid stocks. We introduce the notion of net “liquidity creation” by fund managers and examine its role in explaining the cross section of small-cap equity mutual fund returns. Our empirical results show that on average, small-cap mutual fund managers are able to earn an additional 1.5% return per year as compensation for providing such liquidity services to the market.     

The value of coskewness in mutual fund performance evaluation

Recent asset pricing studies demonstrate the relevance of incorporating coskewness in asset pricing models, and illustrate how this component helps to explain the time variation of ex-ante market risk premiums. This paper analyzes the role of coskewness in mutual fund performance evaluation and finds evidence that adding a coskewness factor is economically and statistically significant. It documents that coskewness is sometimes managed and shows persistence of the coskewness policy over time. One of the most striking results is that many negative (positive) alpha funds, measured relative to the CAPM risk adjustments, would be reclassified as positive (negative) alpha funds using a model with coskewness. Therefore, performance ranking based on risk-adjusted returns without considering coskewness could generate an erroneous classification. Moreover, some fund characteristics, such as turnover ratio or category, are related to the likelihood of managing coskewness.     

Behavioral biases of mutual fund investors

We examine the effect of behavioral biases on the mutual fund choices of a large sample of US discount brokerage investors using new measures of attention to news, tax awareness, and fund-level familiarity bias, in addition to behavioral and demographic characteristics of earlier studies. Behaviorally biased investors typically make poor decisions about fund style and expenses, trading frequency, and timing, resulting in poor performance. Furthermore, trend chasing appears related to behavioral biases, rather than to rationally inferring managerial skill from past performance. Factor analysis suggests that biased investors often conform to stereotypes that can be characterized as Gambler, Smart, Overconfident, Narrow Framer, and Mature.     

The effect of holdings data frequency on conclusions about mutual fund behavior

A number of articles in financial economics have used quarterly or semi-annual mutual fund holdings data to test hypotheses about investment manager behavior. This article reexamines four well-known hypotheses in finance to determine whether the results of prior tests of these hypotheses remain valid when higher frequency (monthly) holdings data are employed. The areas examined are: momentum trading, tax-motivated trading, window dressing, and tournament behavior. We find that the use of monthly holdings data rather than quarterly holdings data or, in the case of tournament behavior, holdings data rather than monthly return data, change, and in some cases reverse, previous results. This occurs because monthly holdings data capture a large number of trades missed by quarterly data (18.5% of the trades) and permit a more precise estimation of the timing of trades.     

Individual investor mutual fund flows

This paper studies the relation between individuals’ mutual fund flows and fund characteristics, establishing three key results. First, consistent with tax motivations, individual investors are reluctant to sell mutual funds that have appreciated in value and are willing to sell losing funds. Second, individuals pay attention to investment costs as redemption decisions are sensitive to both expense ratios and loads. Third, individuals’ fund-level inflows and outflows are sensitive to performance, but in different ways. Inflows are related only to “relative” performance, suggesting that new money chases the best performers in an objective. Outflows are related only to “absolute” fund performance, the relevant benchmark for taxes.     

An empirical analysis of marginal conditional stochastic dominance

Stochastic dominance is a more general approach to expected utility maximization than the widely accepted mean–variance analysis. However, when applied to portfolios of assets, stochastic dominance rules become too complicated for meaningful empirical analysis, and, thus, its practical relevance has been difficult to establish. This paper develops a framework based on the concept of Marginal Conditional Stochastic Dominance (MCSD), introduced by Shalit and Yitzhaki (1994), to test for the first time the relationship between second order stochastic dominance (SSD) and stock returns. We find evidence that MCSD is a significant determinant of stock returns. Our results are robust with respect to the most popular pricing models.     

The dynamics of short-term mutual fund flows and returns: A time-series and cross-sectional investigation

This study analyzes the dynamics of daily mutual fund flows. A Vector Auto Regression (VAR) of flows and returns shows that the behavior of fund investors is more consistent with contrarian rather than momentum characteristics. Past fund flows have a positive impact on future fund returns, with the long-term information effect dominating the transient price-pressure effect. Seasonality in daily flows, such as day-of-week and day-of-month patterns are present, and daily flows are generally mean-reverting. Probit regressions indicate that fund investment objective, marketing policy and level of active management explain cross-sectional variation in the behavioral patterns displayed in daily flows. Our results are robust to the different methods of calculating daily flows based on whether or not the day-end TNA figures include the current-day’s flow. Throughout the analysis, we contrast the dynamics of daily flows with established results for monthly fund flows and find important differences between the two.     

Understanding merger incentives and outcomes in the US mutual fund industry

This paper examines the incentives of acquirers and targets in the merger market. Using data on acquisitions among mutual fund management companies from 1991 to 2004, I estimate a two-sided matching model of the merger market jointly with equations representing merger outcomes. According to the empirical investigation, although the desire to achieve a sufficient scale to attract investors is a key driver for mergers, some mergers seem to be driven by objectives other than shareholder value maximization. I find that companies that are potentially prone to misaligned incentives between owners and managers are more acquisitive than others, yet have significantly worse post-merger operating performance. I also find that these acquirers, despite their higher willingness to pay for targets, are not any more likely to match with high-quality targets, potentially due to targets’ incentive to avoid bad organizations.     

Australian equity mutual fund size effects

Berk and Green propose a model of a superannuation fund industry, with a limited population of superior fund managers and a competitive investor market. In this market, superior fund managers capture the value they generate, leaving investors with a normal return on their investment. Furthermore, it is argued that previous period returns, age of the fund and management costs explain variation in net cash flow paid into a fund over time. The Berk and Green predictions find some support in empirical tests, reported in the present paper, based on Australian Morningstar retail and wholesale equity fund data over the period 1995–2005.