The Predictability of Managerial Heterogeneities in Mutual Funds

Using a sample of Chinese mutual funds, we empirically assess how managerial heterogeneity affects mutual fund performance. We find that funds with higher manager fixed effects outperform those with lower manager fixed effects by 2% per year. We also note that fund performance improves after managers with higher fixed effects are hired. The results are consistent with the notion that manager fixed effects are associated with managerial innate ability. Finally, we find that investors pay attention to managerial attributes beyond the traditional performance measures, providing supporting evidence for the rational explanation of convex flow‐performance sensitivity in the literature.     

Real Estate Fund Flows and the Flow-Performance Relationship

Convexity in the flow-performance relationship of traditional asset class mutual funds is widely documented, however it cannot be assumed to hold for alternative asset classes. This paper addresses this shortcoming in the literature by examining the flow-performance relationship for real estate funds, specifically open-end, direct-property funds. This investment vehicle is designed to provide the risk-return benefits of private market real estate and is available to retail investors in many countries across the globe. An understanding of fund flow dynamics associated with this investment vehicle is of particular interest due to the liquidity risk associated with holding an inherently illiquid asset in an open-end structure. Our analysis draws on the theoretical foundations provided in the literature on mutual fund flows, performance chasing, liquidity risk, participation costs and dynamics across market cycles. We focus on German real estate funds from 1990 to 2010 as this is the largest market globally and there is a high level of confidence in the data. The results show that real estate fund investors chase past performance at the aggregate level and the relationship between flows and relative performance is asymmetric (i.e., convex) at the individual fund level. Fund-level liquidity risk tends to weaken convexity, while sensitivity increases with higher participation costs. We find the flow-performance relationship varies across time, though our interpretation is asset and investment vehicle specific. The implications are applicable to investors and fund managers of open-end, direct-property funds and, more broadly, other alternative asset funds where the underlying asset may not be liquid.     

Mutual Fund Flows and Cross‐Fund Learning within Families

We develop a model of performance evaluation and fund flows for mutual funds in a family. Family performance has two effects on a member fund's estimated skill and inflows: a positive common‐skill effect, and a negative correlated‐noise effect. The overall spillover can be either positive or negative, depending on the weight of common skill and correlation of noise in returns. Its absolute value increases with family size, and declines over time. The sensitivity of flows to a fund's own performance is affected accordingly. Empirical estimates of fund flow sensitivities show patterns consistent with rational cross‐fund learning within families.     

Can Mutual Fund “Stars” Really Pick Stocks? New Evidence from a Bootstrap Analysis

We apply a new bootstrap statistical technique to examine the performance of the U.S. open‐end, domestic equity mutual fund industry over the 1975 to 2002 period. A bootstrap approach is necessary because the cross section of mutual fund alphas has a complex nonnormal distribution due to heterogeneous risk‐taking by funds as well as nonnormalities in individual fund alpha distributions. Our bootstrap approach uncovers findings that differ from many past studies. Specifically, we find that a sizable minority of managers pick stocks well enough to more than cover their costs. Moreover, the superior alphas of these managers persist.     

The flow-performance relationship around the world

We use a new dataset to study how mutual fund flows depend on past performance across 28 countries. We show that there are marked differences in the flow-performance relationship across countries, suggesting that US findings concerning its shape do not apply universally. We find that mutual fund investors sell losers more and buy winners less in more developed countries. This is because investors in more developed countries are more sophisticated and face lower costs of participating in the mutual fund industry. Higher country-level convexity is positively associated with higher levels of risk taking by fund managers.     

Do Mutual Funds Profit from the Accruals Anomaly?

Using data on both fund stockholdings and fund returns, we examine whether actively managed equity mutual funds trade on and profit from the accruals anomaly. We find that few, if any, mutual funds trade on the anomaly. The top 10% of mutual funds that have the highest portfolio weights in low‐accruals stocks have a greater, but still relatively small, exposure to low‐accruals stocks. Nonetheless, these funds make significant profit net of actual transaction costs, exhibiting an average Fama‐French three‐factor alpha of 2.83% per year. We also find that these funds are smaller, less diversified, and exhibit higher fund return volatility and higher fund flow volatility.     

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.     

Do Female Mutual Fund Managers Manage Differently?

We examine the performance and investment behavior of female fixed‐income mutual fund managers compared with male fixed‐income mutual fund managers. We find that male‐ and female‐managed funds do not differ significantly in terms of performance, risk, and other fund characteristics. Our results suggest that differences in investment behavior often attributed to gender may be related to investment knowledge and wealth constraints. Despite the similarities between male and female managers, we find evidence that gender influences the decision making of mutual fund investors. We find that the net asset flows into funds managed by females are lower than for males, especially for the manager's initial year managing the fund.     

Optimal Number of Stock Holdings in Mutual Fund Portfolios Based on Market Performance

Among the decisions that most mutual fund portfolio managers make is the number of stocks to hold. We posit that there is an optimal number of stocks for each mutual fund, reflecting the trade‐off between diversification benefits versus transactions and monitoring costs. We find a significant quadratic relation between number of stock holdings and risk‐adjusted returns for U.S. equity mutual fund portfolios during 1992–2000. Moreover, we find that changes in the number of stocks held over time are more highly correlated with mutual fund flows than with funds' investment returns.     

THE EFFECTS OF MUTUAL FUNDS ON M&A COMPENSATION

Motivated by shareholders’ interest in combating executive wealth expropriation through the merger and acqusition (M&A) process, we study how mutual funds influence firm behavior around an acquisition through votes against management proposals. We find that mutual funds reduce the chief executive officer's ability to extract rents during the M&A process by voting against management‐sponsored compensation proposals after the acquisition, thus lowering both excess compensation and increasing pay‐for‐performance sensitivity. Furthermore, mutual fund voting magnifies the impact on negatively performing firms and firms with a larger amount of the mutual fund's holdings in the firm.     

The company you keep: Investment adviser clientele and mutual fund performance✰

This study examines how the composition of an investment adviser's client base (identified via Form ADV filings) relates to the performance of its mutual funds. Investment advisers catering to institutional clients realize statistically and economically superior risk-adjusted mutual fund performance relative to retail-oriented advisers. Subsequent tests identify the channel(s) responsible for the relationship. The evidence is consistent with both a governance mechanism (i.e., Evans and Fahlenbrach 2012) as well as inefficiencies stemming from the costly search mechanism of Gârleanu and Pedersen's (2018) model for asset management. The results suggest that institutional clients can identify better performing investment managers, particularly in market segments where retail mutual fund investors face higher search costs.     

Flow-Performance Relationship and Star Effect: New Evidence from Chinese Mutual Funds

In this paper, we reexamine the mutual fund flow-performance relationship and star effect using mutual funds in China that have unique features of high risk and low performance persistence. Confirming prior studies, we find that fund performance is positively related to flows in subsequent periods. However, our results show that funds that performed well in the past do not attract additional inflows after controlling for performance. In addition, a star fund, a fund with a five-star Morningstar rating, does not have any significant effect on the fund's flows. These results suggest that it is important to recognize the difference in investor groups and factors that affect performance persistence when analyzing the mutual fund flow-performance relationship.     

The Cross‐Section of Managerial Ability,Incentives, and Risk Preferences

I estimate a dynamic investment model for mutual managers to study the cross‐sectional distribution of ability, incentives, and risk preferences. The manager's compensation depends on the size of the fund, which fluctuates due to fund returns and due to fund flows that respond to the fund's relative performance. The model provides an economic interpretation of time‐varying coefficients in performance regressions in terms of the structural parameters. I document that the estimates of fund alphas are precise and virtually unbiased. I find substantial heterogeneity in ability, risk preferences, and pay‐for‐performance sensitivities that relates to observable fund characteristics.     

The benefits of option use by mutual funds

Based on comprehensive regulatory data on equity mutual fund option use from the SEC's N-SAR filings, we are the first to present consistent evidence that equity funds' option use generates higher risk-adjusted performance. We further show that this is a direct effect of option use and not an indirect effect of other fund characteristics. Option use also directly results in lower systematic risk, as funds show significantly lower market betas during periods of options usage. Finally, mutual funds use options mainly for hedging as they primarily use protective puts and covered calls. These results are independent of known phenomena, such as the low beta anomaly, and robust to tests for endogeneity and a novel 5-factor model including an investable option strategy factor (IOS). Overall, our findings show that mutual fund option use is beneficial to investors and does not pose risk to the financial system as feared by the SEC. Our results are thus important for investors as well as regulators.     

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.     

Portfolio concentration and fund manager performance

This research examines the relationships among portfolio concentration, fund manager skills, and fund performance in Taiwan's equity mutual fund industry, yielding several empirical findings as follows. First, after controlling for other factors, concentrated equity funds tend to have smaller net asset values, larger fund flows, higher turnover rates, and a younger age and prevail in smaller fund families. Second, concentrated fund managers buy and sell stocks more smartly based on economic trends or market factors than do diversified fund managers, i.e., they have better market‐timing abilities. Third, only partial evidence supports the premise that concentrated equity funds have better next‐quarter risk‐adjusted performances than do diversified ones, as these fund managers' skills positively correlate to risk‐adjusted fund performance. Fourth, fund managers who have better stock‐picking abilities and intensively invest in certain industries generally exhibit better Carhart's alpha in the next quarter than do other fund managers. Fifth, fund managers' stock‐picking abilities more closely relate to long‐term performance than do their market‐timing abilities. Lastly, positive performance persistence is much stronger than negative performance persistence, but concentrated funds do not have stronger performance persistence than do diversified funds.     

What Matters to Individual Investors? Evidence from the Horse's Mouth

We survey a representative sample of U.S. individuals about how well leading academic theories describe their financial beliefs and decisions. We find substantial support for many factors hypothesized to affect portfolio equity share, particularly background risk, investment horizon, rare disasters, transactional factors, and fixed costs of stock market participation. Individuals tend to believe that past mutual fund performance is a good signal of stock-picking skill, actively managed funds do not suffer from diseconomies of scale, value stocks are safer and do not have higher expected returns, and high-momentum stocks are riskier and do have higher expected returns.     

The ABCs of mutual funds: On the introduction of multiple share classes

We study a significant innovation with widespread consequences for the mutual fund industry: the introduction of multiple-class funds that give investors a choice among alternative load and fee structures. The transition to a multiple-class structure represents an important step in the evolution of the mutual fund industry. It also provides a well-controlled setting for research on the structure of funds, on investor clienteles and their impact on fund performance and, more generally, about the manner in which financial innovations tend to be adopted. We develop a simple model of a fund's decision on whether and when to introduce new classes and empirically investigate the model's predictions that: (a) Funds with more skilled management, less sensitivity of flows to performance, smaller size, higher existing loads and membership in larger families are better positioned to benefit and, therefore, more likely to switch to a multiple-class structure earlier; (b) The new classes increase the level and volatility of fund inflow by attracting investors with short and uncertain investment horizons – which, in turn, can negatively impact fund performance. Our empirical results are generally supportive of the model's predictions.     

Reverse Survivorship Bias

Mutual funds often disappear following poor performance. When this poor performance is partly attributable to negative idiosyncratic shocks, funds' estimated alphas understate their true alphas. This paper estimates a structural model to correct for this bias. Although most funds still have negative alphas, they are not nearly as low as those suggested by the fund‐by‐fund regressions. Approximately 12% of funds have net four‐factor model alphas greater than 2% per year. All studies that run fund‐by‐fund regressions to draw inferences about the prevalence of skill among mutual fund managers are subject to reverse survivorship bias.     

IPO underpricing and mutual fund allocation: New evidence from registration system

We study the effect of mutual fund allocation on China's IPO market under the new registration system. The introduction of mutual fund bids significantly increases the IPO offer price, resulting in a low initial short-term return and suppressed IPO underpricing. Those newly listed stocks witness lower volatility in the following weeks due to preferential allocation to the mutual fund at the primary market. Further analysis suggests that large investors' net purchase strengthens IPO after-market return and volatility. Besides, the effect of mutual fund participation on IPOs is stronger in places where the COVID-19 outbreak. This new evidence suggests that mutual fund allocation plays a critical role in IPO price discovery and decreases investor lottery trading.