Leaders and followers: emerging market fund behavior during tranquil and turbulent times

Recent episodes of capital market volatility and contagion have brought up many questions about the behavior of international investors. We address some of these questions, exploring the behavior of different types of emerging market equity funds with monthly data on individual country holdings. Consistent with the notion that fund behavior can largely be traced to redemptions by individual investors, we find that open-end funds withdraw more from vulnerable countries around crises than their closed-end counterparts. We show that open-end funds’ flows Granger-cause closed-end funds investments, possibly because the closed-end funds are forced to follow their more fickle open-end counterparts. Single-country fund flows precede those of global funds, suggesting an informational advantage of the former. The evidence does not support the notion that small funds are at a disadvantage in gathering country information.