Determinants of cost efficiencies in the mutual fund industry

We evaluate determinants of cost efficiencies in the U.S. mutual fund industry for 1998-2003. Our empirical results show that cost increases in this industry have been less than proportional to increases in assets. We find that funds without a 12b-1 plan show larger economies of scale than funds with a 12b-1 plan; institutional funds show greater economies of scale than do retail funds; and that fund families that are more focused in their investment objectives reap benefits of lower fund management costs than do fund families that are more diversified in their investment objectives.     

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.     

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.     

Board structure,mergers, and shareholder wealth: A study of the mutual fund industry

We study mutual fund mergers between 1999 and 2001 to understand the role and effectiveness of fund boards. Some fund mergers—typically across-family mergers—benefit target shareholders but are costly to target fund directors. Such mergers are more likely when funds underperform and their boards have a larger percentage of independent trustees, suggesting that more-independent boards tolerate less underperformance before initiating across-family mergers. This effect is most pronounced when all of the fund's directors are independent, not the 75% level of independence required by the SEC. Higher-paid target fund boards are less likely to approve across-family mergers that cause substantial reductions in their compensation.     

Agency costs,governance, and organizational forms: Evidence from the mutual fund industry

Using a comprehensive sample of mutual funds and fund families for the period 1992–2004, this study examines the impact of fund management companies’ organizational forms on the level of agency costs within mutual funds. We find that, all else being equal: (1) funds managed by public fund families charge higher fees than those managed by private fund families; (2) public fund families acquire more funds than private fund families; and (3) funds of public fund families significantly underperform funds of private fund families. Collectively, these findings suggest that agency costs are higher in mutual funds managed by public fund families. Our results are consistent with the idea that the agency conflict between the fund management company and fund shareholders is more acute for public management companies because of their shorter-term focus.     

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.     

The cross-section of mutual fund fee dispersion

In this paper, we empirically analyze the factors affecting the cross section of mutual fund fee dispersion. In the context of equity mutual funds, fee dispersion stems primarily from the heterogeneity of products, clienteles and production functions. However, the relevant theory predicts that search costs can also generate fee dispersion. By controlling for observable sources of heterogeneity, we find that fee dispersion decreases with fund size and age, as well as with the amount of assets under management of the investment company. In addition, we find lower levels of fee dispersion for funds that charge marketing and distribution fees. Although we cannot rule out the possibility that these factors are a proxy for some unobserved source of heterogeneity, our results are also consistent with the theoretical prediction that search costs positively affect fee dispersion.     

Employment risk,compensation incentives,and managerial risk taking: Evidence from the mutual fund industry

We examine the influence on managerial risk taking of incentives due to employment risk and due to compensation. Our empirical investigation of the risk taking behavior of mutual fund managers indicates that managerial risk taking crucially depends on the relative importance of these incentives. When employment risk is more important than compensation incentives, fund managers with a poor midyear performance tend to decrease risk relative to leading managers to prevent potential job loss. When employment risk is low, compensation incentives become more relevant and fund managers with a poor midyear performance increase risk to catch up with the midyear winners.     

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.     

Commonalities in investment strategy and the determinants of performance in mutual fund mergers

This paper examines the determinants of cross-sectional variation in post-merger mutual fund performance. Mergers between funds with similar management objectives, as reflected by average portfolio book-to-market ratio, price–earnings ratio, beta and market capitalization values, outperform mergers between funds with dissimilar strategies. This superior performance transcends lower portfolio rebalancing costs which might be realized between merging funds which hold more assets in common. These results suggest that mutual fund mergers create collaborative benefits between funds with similar strategies. We also examine if fund governance structures influence the fund pairing process, testing if stronger fund oversight mitigates pairing mismatches. We find that less independent boards of trustees and boards with higher compensation are related to greater strategic mismatches between funds. These results suggest that more entrenched boards are more tolerant of fund mismatches which benefit the investment company, yet are not in investor’s best interests.     

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.     

A statistically robust decomposition of mutual fund performance

Previous decompositions of risk-adjusted mutual fund performance might deliver biased results. In this paper, we provide new reliable insights on the drivers of mutual fund performance by decomposing risk-adjusted performance of U.S. equity mutual funds using the Generalized Calendar Time regression model. According to our results, out of all previously considered fund characteristics, only the negative effect of lagged fund size and the positive effects of lagged performance and lagged family size remain highly significant. Our analysis further suggests that much of the variation in previous empirical results can be attributed to methodological issues.     

Management sub-advising in the mutual fund industry

This is a study of how contractual mechanisms can mitigate agency conflicts in sub-advised mutual funds. Sub-advising contracts allow fund families to expand their product offerings to include new investment styles and thereby gain market share. We show that costly contractual arrangements, such as co-branding, multi-advising, and performance-based compensation, can mitigate agency conflicts in outsourcing and protect investors from potential underperformance. Fund families will find it cost-effective to implement such incentive mechanisms only when investors are sophisticated in assessing manager skill. The findings help to explain why a large percentage of fund families outsource their funds to advisory firms.     

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.     

Share restrictions and asset pricing: Evidence from the hedge fund industry

This paper presents evidence on the relation between hedge fund returns and restrictions imposed by funds that limit the liquidity of fund investors. The excess returns of funds with lockup restrictions are approximately 4–7% per year higher than those of nonlockup funds. The average alpha of all funds is negative or insignificant after controlling for lockups and other share restrictions. Also, a negative relation is found between share restrictions and the liquidity of the fund's portfolio. This suggests that share restrictions allow funds to efficiently manage illiquid assets, and these benefits are captured by investors as a share illiquidity premium.     

Short-term persistence in hybrid mutual fund performance: The role of style-shifting abilities

Our study analyzes the performance of hybrid mutual funds. Based on two extended Carhart models we determine total fund performance by comparing fund returns to investable fund-specific style benchmarks. Using daily returns and a quarterly measurement interval, we present an innovative return-based approach to decompose total performance into in-quarter abnormal performance and style-shifting performance. In addition, we split total style-shifting performance into active and passive components. In this context, we confirm possible benefits of these performance measures by analyzing several simulated investment strategies. Our empirical study covers 520 hybrid mutual funds from 10/1998 to 12/2009 and shows that hybrid mutual funds (i) do not outperform their benchmarks on average, (ii) partially show positive in-quarter abnormal performance and style-shifting abilities, and (iii) exhibit short-term persistence in in-quarter abnormal performance but not in style-shifting abilities.     

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.     

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.     

Sentimental mutual fund flows

We show that many stylized empirical patterns for mutual fund flows are driven by investor sentiment. Specifically, when sentiment is high, investors exhibit a stronger tendency of chasing past fund performance; fund flows are less sensitive to fund expenses; and investors are attracted more to funds with sheer visibility. Moreover, the well‐documented positive relation between fund flows and future fund performance is significant only during high sentiment periods and is mainly driven by expected component of fund flows. Finally, we show that mutual fund investors exhibit a significantly negative timing ability at the individual fund level when sentiment is high.     

Performance aspects of Greek bond mutual funds

This paper examines the performance characteristics of Greek bond funds and the impact of fund flows on portfolio returns. The evidence shows that on average bond funds do not offer risk-adjusted profits exceeding the returns of the benchmark index, which is in consistence with the US and international evidence. Returns before fees are slightly superior to the returns of the benchmark index, but when fees are considered they lag considerably. The security selection and market timing skills of fund managers are also tested using both an unconditional and a conditional model to test for the impact of public information variables. We also find that fund flows impact negatively on market timing.