Favoritism in Mutual Fund Families? Evidence on Strategic Cross‐Fund Subsidization

We investigate whether mutual fund families strategically transfer performance across member funds to favor those more likely to increase overall family profits. We find that “high family value” funds (i.e., high fees or high past performers) overperform at the expense of “low value” funds. Such a performance gap is above the one existing between similar funds not affiliated with the same family. Better allocations of underpriced initial public offering deals and opposite trades across member funds partly explain why high value funds overperform. Our findings highlight how the family organization prevalent in the mutual fund industry generates distortions in delegated asset management.     

Luck versus Skill in the Cross‐Section of Mutual Fund Returns

The aggregate portfolio of actively managed U.S. equity mutual funds is close to the market portfolio, but the high costs of active management show up intact as lower returns to investors. Bootstrap simulations suggest that few funds produce benchmark‐adjusted expected returns sufficient to cover their costs. If we add back the costs in fund expense ratios, there is evidence of inferior and superior performance (nonzero true α) in the extreme tails of the cross‐section of mutual fund α estimates.     

Costly Search and Mutual Fund Flows

This paper studies the flows of funds into and out of equity mutual funds. Consumers base their fund purchase decisions on prior performance information, but do so asymmetrically, investing disproportionately more in funds that performed very well the prior period. Search costs seem to be an important determinant of fund flows. High performance appears to be most salient for funds that exert higher marketing effort, as measured by higher fees. Flows are directly related to the size of the fund's complex as well as the current media attention received by the fund, which lower consumers' search costs.     

Dedicated REIT Mutual Fund Flows and REIT Performance

This study examines the effects of weekly and monthly capital flows into the dedicated REIT mutual fund sector on aggregate REIT returns and, simultaneously, the effects of industry-level REIT returns on subsequent REIT mutual fund flows. The dynamic relation between REIT capital flows and returns is estimated using vector autoregression (VAR) techniques. Unlike static regression techniques, our dynamic model produces estimates of the short-run relationships, long-run relationships, impulse response functions, and forecast variance decompositions. We find evidence that REIT mutual fund flows are positively and significantly related to prior returns, while prior REIT mutual fund flows do not significantly influence REIT returns. However, contemporaneous flows do appear to have an initial positive effect, which is partially reversed one period later. The positive contemporaneous effect, however, is the result of unexpected REIT mutual fund flows, while the expected portion is insignificant.     

Conflicting Family Values in Mutual Fund Families

We analyze the investment behavior of affiliated funds of mutual funds (AFoMFs), which are mutual funds that can only invest in other funds in the family, and are offered by most large families. Though never mentioned in any prospectus, we discover that AFoMFs provide an insurance pool against temporary liquidity shocks to other funds in the family. We show that, though the family benefits because funds can avoid fire sales, the cost of this insurance is borne by the investors in the AFoMFs. The paper thus uncovers some of the hidden complexities of fiduciary responsibility in mutual fund families.     

Learning about Mutual Fund Managers

We study capital allocations to managers with two mutual funds, and show that investors learn about managers from their performance records. Flows into a fund are predicted by the manager's performance in his other fund, especially when he outperforms and when signals from the other fund are more useful. In equilibrium, capital should be allocated such that there is no cross‐fund predictability. However, we find positive predictability, particularly among underperforming funds. Our results are consistent with incomplete learning: while investors move capital in the right direction, they do not withdraw enough capital when the manager underperforms in his other fund.     

Geography,Informal Information Flows and Mutual Fund Portfolios

This paper explores how informal information channels impact mutual fund performance. We measure the strengths of two location‐based information channels: 1) information transfers among fund managers (fund‐fund links) and 2) transfers between managers and the companies in which they invest (fund‐company links). We find that each channel increases investment performance in the absence of the other, but decreases it when acting in combination. Stock selection associated with the presence of one channel, but the absence of the other, earns positive future returns. Our results indicate that the economic benefits of informal information channels depend critically on the nature of their interactions.     

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.     

Performance Chasing,Fund Flows and Fund Size in Real Estate Mutual Funds

Real estate mutual funds have grown dramatically in number, size, scope and assets under management over the last 15 years, but little assessment is evident. The present study addresses this limitation. Better prior period performance is associated with greater shares of fund inflows for a period. Returns, however, are negatively associated with increased fund flows and fund size. Investors chase past performance limiting fund managers’ ability to optimize investments. Under normal market conditions, but departing from typical mutual fund performance, real estate mutual fund returns generally exceed relevant benchmarks on a before expenses basis and match benchmark returns after expenses. The ability to meet and exceed benchmark returns, however, does not hold during the financial crisis period. Overall, more established funds are shown to have higher returns while fund turnover is not a determinant of returns.     

Failure Risk and the Cross‐Section of Hedge Fund Returns

Modeling a hedge fund's probability of failure with a dynamic logit regression, I find that the probability of a fund's failure has a significantly negative effect on the fund's future returns. A quintile portfolio with the highest failure probability underperforms a quintile portfolio with the lowest failure probability by 5% to 6% per year from 1997 to 2012. The results are robust to the definition of hedge fund failure and controlling for a large set of risk factors and fund characteristics. Moreover, the negative effect of failure probability on future fund returns is stronger for funds with weak share restrictions.     

Changing Names with Style: Mutual Fund Name Changes and Their Effects on Fund Flows

We examine whether mutual funds change their names to take advantage of current hot investment styles, and what effects these name changes have on inflows to the funds, and to the funds' subsequent returns. We find that the year after a fund changes its name to reflect a current hot style, the fund experiences an average cumulative abnormal flow of 28%, with no improvement in performance. The increase in flows is similar across funds whose holdings match the style implied by their new name and those whose holdings do not, suggesting that investors are irrationally influenced by cosmetic effects.     

Independent Directors and Favoritism: When Multiple Board Affiliations Prevail in Mutual Fund Families

I examine whether independent directors with multiple board affiliations (IDMAs) trade off the interests of one fund relative to another (fund favoritism) or whether they benefit fund shareholders by increasing the level of the board's expertise. Using a sample of mutual funds affiliated with the top 55 fund sponsors from 2002 to 2008, I find that the presence of IDMAs is negatively related to performance/resource shifting across funds within fund families. IDMAs appear to decrease fund fees, increase the return gap associated with the unobserved actions of fund managers, and facilitate the transfer of information across funds in a fund family.     

The Effects of Advertising on Mutual Fund Flows: Results from a New Database

We examine 471,000 mutual fund company advertisements from 1997 to 2003 to study advertising's effect on fund inflows. We find advertising is generally ineffective in attracting inflows but was more effective during the bear market despite smaller advertising expenditures during this time. The top 10 advertisers in our sample were most successful in capturing inflows. These companies generated inflows with mutual fund ads; other companies succeeded when advertising their other products and their brand image. Within a fund family, advertising affects the flagship fund differently than the other funds. Sample firms appeared unable to choose correctly between print and TV ads.     

基金流量与基金投资行为——基于动态面板数据模型的实证研究

本文通过引入基金流量变量,对中国证券投资基金是否稳定市场这一争议性命题进行解析,挖掘中国基金经理投资行为"异质性"背后的基金申赎行为因素,试图从基金流量引发基金经理资产配置动态调整的视角对中国证券投资基金"是否行为理性"这一重要命题进行重新诠释。在实证过程中,本文构建动态面板模型对2006～2010年股票型开放式基金季度数据进行估计,检验结果表明我国证券投资基金投资行为受到基金流量的显著影响,基金持有人行为对基金经理投资行为具有冲击效应,并直接影响到基金经理的策略选择和资产组合调整。结合研究结论,本文提出推进中国版"401K"计划,优化基金持有人结构,合理引导基金投资者行为,减小基金异常申赎行为对市场波动性的传递效应等政策建议。     

Mutual Fund Trading Pressure: Firm‐Level Stock Price Impact and Timing of SEOs

We use price pressure resulting from purchases by mutual funds with large capital inflows to identify overvalued equity. This is a relatively exogenous overvaluation indicator as it is associated with who is buying—buyers with excess liquidity—rather than what is being purchased. We document substantial stock price impact associated with purchases by high‐inflow mutual funds, and find the probability of a seasoned equity offering (SEO), insider sales, and the probability of a stock‐based acquisition increase significantly in the four quarters following the mutual fund buying pressure. These results provide new evidence that firm managers are able to identify and exploit overvalued equity.     

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.     

Macroeconomic Forces and Mutual Fund Betas

This paper develops and tests a model in which fund betas are linearly related to changes in macroeconomic factors. Tests using monthly returns for 171 mutual funds over 1978–1991 were run. Results indicate that equity funds betas, on average, are negatively related to inflation changes and default risk premia while bond fund betas, on average, are negatively related to changes in risk-free rates, industrial production growth, and the term structure. Betas for passive portfolios, however, are not related to the macroeconomic factors examined.     

Bayesian Alphas and Mutual Fund Persistence

We use daily returns to compare the performance predictability of Bayesian estimates of mutual fund performance with standard frequentist measures. When the returns on passive nonbenchmark assets are correlated with fund holdings, incorporating histories of these returns produces a performance measure that predicts future performance better than standard measures do. Bayesian alphas based on the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) are particularly useful for predicting future standard CAPM alphas. Over our sample period, priors consistent with moderate to diffuse beliefs in managerial skill dominate more skeptical prior beliefs, a result that is consistent with investor cash flows.     

Family Matters: Rankings Within Fund Families and Fund Inflows

Abstract:  This paper examines the influence of the position of a fund within its family on its subsequent net-inflows. Our empirical study of the US equity mutual fund market shows that reaching a top position within the family leads to large inflows. These inflows accrue beyond those expected, given the performance of the fund in its respective market segment. The effect is much stronger in large families than in small families. We also find that inflows significantly increase if a fund moves into the top positions within its family from one year to another. These results lead to competition within the fund family and to important risk taking incentives for fund managers.