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.     

Board Independence and Mutual Fund Manager Turnover

This paper studies the relationship between board independence and manager turnover in the mutual fund industry. Using the Lipper 2003 mutual fund board data, we find that manager turnover is more likely to happen to funds with poor prior performance and more independent boards. Consistent with previous studies such as Tufano and Sevick (1997), our research provides new evidence in support of the Securities and Exchange Commission's approach of improving fund governance by promoting board independence.     

Fund Manager Succession in Closed-End Mutual Funds

Managing the succession process by the hiring and firing of key executives is one of the important functions of a board of directors. In this research we study successions of fund managers in the closed‐end mutual fund industry. The agency issues inherent in closed‐end mutual funds makes them a unique laboratory for such a study. Our results suggest that while the overall abnormal returns of these manager changes are statistically insignificant, that the returns are more positive for funds with large expense ratios and for funds trading at a discount. We also find the abnormal returns are negatively related to the percentage of inside director stock ownership. Corporate bond funds and international equity funds react more negatively to these announcements than other types of funds. The abnormal returns do not appear to be related to board composition, but board composition does vary across fund type, and may therefore indirectly influence the results.     

Improved Forecasting of Mutual Fund Alphas and Betas

This paper proposes a simple back testing procedure that isshown to dramatically improve a panel data model's ability toproduce out of sample forecasts. Here the procedure is usedto forecast mutual fund alphas. Using monthly data with an OLSmodel it has been difficult to consistently predict which portfoliomanagers will produce above market returns for their investors.This paper provides empirical evidence that sorting on the estimatedalphas populates the top and bottom deciles not with the bestand worst funds, but with those having the greatest estimationerror. This problem can be attenuated by back testing the statisticalmodel fund by fund. The back test used here requires a statisticalmodel to exhibit some past predictive success for a particularfund before it is allowed to make predictions about that fundin the current period. Another estimation problem concerns theuse of a single statistical model for all available mutual funds.Since no one statistical model is likely to fit every fund,the result is a great deal of misspecification error. This papershows that the combined use of an OLS and Kalman filter modelincreases the number of funds with predictable out of samplealphas by about 60%. Overall, a strategy that uses very modestex-ante filters to eliminate funds whose parameters likely deriveprimarily from estimation error produces an out of sample risk-adjustedreturn of over 4% per annum.     

基金经理更换、股票联动与股票价格

基金经理更换打破了基金共同持股投资组合中股票的关联性,降低了股票收益率相关性,进而影响了股票价格。本文基于基金共同持股和基金经理更换构建了对冲投资组合,获得0.1%的日超额收益率。基金投资组合中股票收益率相关性能够解释这种超额收益率,本文发现基金更换经理后,新基金经理重建投资组合,打破了原投资组合中股票间的关联,股票收益率相关性减弱,基金共同持股程度高的股票价格受到了更大影响。基金的被动流动性冲击不能解释本文的发现。本文的研究表明基金经理变更等基金管理行为通过股票收益率相关性对股票价格产生了重要影响。     

How Does Size Affect Mutual Fund Behavior?

If actively managed mutual funds suffer from diminishing returns to scale, funds should alter investment behavior as assets under management increase. Although asset growth has little effect on the behavior of the typical fund, we find that large funds and small‐cap funds diversify their portfolios in response to growth. Greater diversification, especially for small‐cap funds, is associated with better performance. Fund family growth is related to the introduction of new funds that hold different stocks from their existing siblings. Funds with many siblings diversify less rapidly as they grow, suggesting that the fund family may influence a fund's portfolio strategy.     

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.     

Fund Manager Allocation

We show that fund families allocate their most skilled managers to market segments in which manager skill is rewarded best. In efficient markets, even skilled managers cannot generate excess returns. In less efficient markets, skilled managers can exploit inefficiencies and generate higher performance than unskilled managers. Fund families seem to be aware of the relation between skill, efficiency, and performance, and allocate more skilled managers to inefficient markets. They pursue this strategy when hiring new fund managers and when reassigning managers to funds within the family. Overall, we conclude that fund families allocate fund managers in an efficient way.     

我国基金经理投资行为实证研究

我国证券市场快速发展,推动了基金业的迅猛增长,随着基金数量的增多,作为管理基金的基金经理的作用和地位正在迅速上升。基金经理的投资决策行为势必会影响到基金的业绩,如何综合评价基金经理的投资行为,是摆在我们面前的一大课题。本文在对国内外学者有关基金经理投资行为文献评析的基础上,提出了投资行为度的概念,并运用多元回归计量方法和突变评价法对我国基金经理的投资风格、投资策略、投资绩效、择股时机选择能力、风险管理能力以及个人行为模式和基金业绩之间的关系等进行了实证检验,得出了一些有意义的结论。最后从行为金融理论角度分析了中国证券投资基金经理行为偏离的根本原因,并提出相应的政策建议。     

Mutual Fund Survivorship

This article provides a comprehensive study of survivorshipissues using the mutual fund data of Carhart (1997). We demonstratetheoretically that when survival depends on multiperiod performance,the survivorship bias in average performance typically increaseswith the sample length. This is empirically relevant becauseevidence suggests a multiyear survival rule for U.S. mutualfunds. In the data we find the annual bias increases from 0.07%for 1-year samples to 1% for samples longer than 15 years. Wefind that survivor conditioning weakens evidence of performancepersistence. Finally, we explain how survivor conditioning affectsthe relation between performance and fund characteristics.     

Mutual Fund Incubation

Incubation is a strategy for initiating new funds, where multiple funds are started privately, and, at the end of an evaluation period, some are opened to the public. Consistent with incubation being used by fund families to increase performance and attract flows, funds in incubation outperform nonincubated funds by 3.5% risk‐adjusted, and when they are opened to the public they attract higher flows. Postincubation, however, this outperformance disappears. This performance reversal imparts an upward bias to returns that is not removed by a fund size filter. Fund age and ticker creation date filters, however, eliminate the bias.     

Mutual Fund Tax Clienteles

Mutual funds are held by investors in taxable and tax‐qualified retirement accounts. We investigate whether the characteristics, investment strategies, and performance of mutual funds held by these diverse tax clienteles differ. Examining both mutual fund distributions and mutual fund holdings, we find that funds held primarily by taxable investors choose investment strategies that result in lower tax burdens than funds held primarily in tax‐qualified accounts. Despite these differences, we find no evidence that any investment constraints that may arise from these tax‐efficient investment strategies result in performance differences between funds held by different tax clienteles.     

Mutual Fund Liquidity Costs

One dollar in purchases or redemptions generates an average cost of $0.006 for US equity mutual funds during the period 1997‐2009, approximately 70% lower than prior estimates derived from older data. However, large cross‐sectional differences exist between funds. Many funds have costs near zero, but funds that hold relatively illiquid equities, have relatively concentrated portfolios, and manage relatively large amounts of assets have average liquidity costs significantly greater than the full sample average. Furthermore, despite a large difference in underlying asset liquidity, US bond funds and US equity funds have similar average liquidity costs.     

证券基金立法进行时

立法部门审议证券投资基金法草案 新华社 2002年8月23日 保障中国基金业高速、健康发展的重要法律<中华人民共和国证券投资基金法(草案)>,提请九届全国人大常委会第29次会议审议.草案对中国基金的组织和运作方式、保护基金份额持有人的合法权益以及外资参股中国基金管理机构等重要问题作出明确规定.     

Evaluating Mutual Fund Performance

We study standard mutual fund performance measures, using simulated funds whose characteristics mimic actual funds. We find that performance measures used in previous mutual fund research have little ability to detect economically large magnitudes (e.g., three percent per year) of abnormal fund performance, particularly if a fund's style characteristics differ from those of the value-weighted market portfolio. Power can be substantially improved, however, using event-study procedures that analyze a fund's stock trades. These procedures are feasible using time-series data sets on mutual fund portfolio holdings.     

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.     

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.