Three Essays on Mutual Funds

Three Essays on Mutual Funds
Author: Xuemei Guo
Publisher:
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2017
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation investigates the determinants of mutual fund flows and mutual fund performance. The first chapter examines the response of fund investors to style volatility and the impact of style volatility on the flow-performance relationship. Three main empirical findings are obtained using both a portfolio approach and a multivariate regression approach. First, I find that there is a significant positive relationship between the style volatility and the subsequent fund flows to mutual funds. This finding can be interpreted as either fund managers having style timing ability or fund managers catering to investors preferences or tastes. Second, the positive relationship between past style volatility and fund flows is less pronounced for funds with superior past performance. Lastly, fund style volatility has a dampening effect on the flow-performance relationship: the flow-performance sensitivity weakens by 12% when the past style volatility increases by one standard deviation. It is likely that performance is perceived as a less informative signal of investment ability for fund managers who follow inconsistent styles over time. The second chapter studies how the response of fund investors to past risk varies over business cycles. I employ the NBER boom indicator, the Consumer Sentiment Index, and the National Activity Index to proxy for economic conditions. I find that mutual fund investors react differently to risk across economic environments. Funds with more volatile past returns discourage fund investors. The investors’ demand for actively managed funds is higher under good market conditions. Fund flows are less responsive to risk during expansionary economic periods. This finding may indicate that fund investors are risk averse and become less risk averse in good market states. The third chapter empirically examines whether mutual fund performance is affected by prior family performance. I propose two testable hypotheses: the information and resource sharing hypothesis and the cross-fund subsidization hypothesis. The empirical findings suggest that there is a significant positive relationship between prior family performance and subsequent fund performance. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that mutual funds in the same family share informational resources. This positive relation also justifies the finding in the mutual fund flow literature that fund flows are higher for funds with higher past family performance. Furthermore, I find that the predictive power of the prior family performance is stronger in larger fund families.

Two Essays on Mutual Fund Managerial Skills and Performance

Two Essays on Mutual Fund Managerial Skills and Performance
Author: Ao Wang
Publisher:
Total Pages: 112
Release: 2021
Genre: Mutual funds
ISBN:

This dissertation consists of two essays that study mutual fund managerial skills and performance.Understanding whether mutual funds have skills is important as it could help investors make investment decision. My fist essay studies whether and how fund size affects managers' risk-taking behavior in the setting of fund mergers. I test the relation between fund size and risk-shifting. The main findings are as follows. First, acquiring fund managers' risk-taking declines as size increases resulting from mergers. The decline in risk-taking remains significant after controlling for fund characteristics, diversification effect, and portfolio's systematic risk exposure that can be correlated with managers' investment choices. Second, liquidity is a driving factor for the negative impact of size on managers' risk-taking. Third, I decompose fund size into two components based on either liquidity or risk-taking and examine which component(s) correlate with fund performance. I document that risk-taking is, beyond liquidity, another underlying mechanism for decreasing returns to scale.In the second essay, I study the timing ability of mutual funds in different sentiment periods. I first use DGTW (1997) style timing measure (CT) to examine if mutual funds perform better in high sentiment periods when stock mispricing is enlarged, providing more trading opportunities for mutual funds. Results show that mutual funds have better style timing ability in high sentiment than in low sentiment. The result is robust when I use alternative sentiment measures and different model specifications. Moreover, the style timing ability in high sentiment periods is more pronounced for less expensive funds with lower turnover and active shares. Then I investigate the source of this timing ability using 9 well-known stock return anomalies. I construct an anomaly timing measure (AT) using each of the 9 individual anomalies as well as the composite anomaly. AT is developed to detect whether fund managers could successfully time a certain anomaly. I find that mutual funds have better anomaly timing ability in composite anomaly and 4 contrarian anomalies which are investment-to-assets, asset growth, composite equity issue and net operating assets. Furthermore, I provide evidence that mutual funds with better timing abilities could outperform overall.

Essays on Investor and Mutual Fund Behavior

Essays on Investor and Mutual Fund Behavior
Author: Andrew John Caffrey
Publisher:
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2006
Genre: Financial risk
ISBN:

This dissertation consists of three essays on the relations among investors, mutual funds, and fund families. Chapter one presents a model of new fund openings as a function of the past performance of a family's existing funds. At the fund level, we model the relations among fund performance, investment flows, and the risk-taking behavior of the fund manager. Our model predicts that families dominated either by outperforming funds or by underperforming funds are more likely to open a new fund than are families composed of average performers. We predict that an asymmetric performance-fund flow relation combined with expected intra-family flows from existing underperformers to a new fund provide an incentive for families with severely under-performing funds to open a new fund in hopes of managing a `star'. Chapter two presents an empirical analysis of new fund openings. We study fund performance, investment flows, and risk level and examine the relation between the distribution of performance across funds within a family and new fund openings. We find that new fund openings are positively correlated with measures of both extreme underperformance and extreme outperformance of existing funds as well as measures of the number of `dog' funds within a family. The evidence supports our predictions in Chapter 1. Chapter three addresses the relation between advisory firm organization and mutual fund performance and expenses. Specifically, we hypothesize three relations. First, the ownership structure of a fund family--mutualized, privately held, or publicly owned--may impact fund manager behavior and be reflected in expenses and/or performance. Second, fund families may experience some net pecuniary benefit or harm as a result of subsidiary affiliation. Finally, we examine expense and performance differences across directly advised versus subadvised funds. We find evidence that publicly owned fund families provide investors with lower style-adjusted returns and alpha at higher cost than do privately owned or mutualized families. Similarly, we find that bank and insurance affiliates underperform their peers in both returns net of expenses and alpha net of expenses, and that diversified financial services affiliates outperform in these measures.

Swing Pricing and Fragility in Open-end Mutual Funds

Swing Pricing and Fragility in Open-end Mutual Funds
Author: Dunhong Jin
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 46
Release: 2019-11-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1513519492

How to prevent runs on open-end mutual funds? In recent years, markets have observed an innovation that changed the way open-end funds are priced. Alternative pricing rules (known as swing pricing) adjust funds’ net asset values to pass on funds’ trading costs to transacting shareholders. Using unique data on investor transactions in U.K. corporate bond funds, we show that swing pricing eliminates the first-mover advantage arising from the traditional pricing rule and significantly reduces redemptions during stress periods. The positive impact of alternative pricing rules on fund flows reverses in calm periods when costs associated with higher tracking error dominate the pricing effect.

Essays on Mutual Fund Activeness and Sustainability as a Flow Determinant

Essays on Mutual Fund Activeness and Sustainability as a Flow Determinant
Author: Sebastian Fischer
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2019
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation contributes to two recent debates in the mutual fund literature: The impact of sustainability on mutual fund flows and the connection between fund activeness and mutual fund performance. In March 2016, Morningstar, one of the leading information providers in the mutual fund industry, introduced its mutual fund Sustainability Rating. The Rating provides investors with an easy-to-understand measure to identify funds that invest in accordance with high environmental, social, and governance standards. Chapter 1 investigates the effect of this Rating on mutual fund flows. An average high-rated retail fund receives up to USD 10.1 million higher net flows and an average low-rated retail fund suffers from up to USD 3.5 million lower net flows than an average-rated fund during the first year after the publication of the Rating. This result stresses the importance of sustainability as an investment criterion and the impact of the Sustainability Rating as a source of information to private investors. Chapters 2 through 4 examine whether the trading activity of a fund manager or fund activeness, that is the deviation of a fund portfolio from its benchmark, is linked to future performance. The fund literature has identified various activity measures that can predict fund returns. Chapter 2 shows that two of the most important measures, Active Share and the R2 selectivity measure, have not been good predictors after 2003 when controlling for different benchmark indices and alternative risk factors. Chapter 3 examines the investment performance of funds whose exposures to the risk factors of the Carhart model vary significantly over time. The analysis shows that funds with volatile factor weights achieve on average lower returns than funds with stable factor exposures. After testing for alternative explanations, this result provides evidence that fund managers fail to time risk factors. This finding also contributes to the current debate on whether risk factors can be timed. Chapter 4 addresses the question whether fund managers trade more in times of large market mispricing and, therefore, whether fund turnover is positively correlated to the subsequent fund performance. The results confirm respective findings from earlier research for an international mutual fund sample. They additionally show that this turnover-performance relationship is particularly strong in countries with highly skilled fund managers, who trade more in times of high market opportunities. Furthermore, the effect is stronger in markets with a low performance persistence.

Two Essays on Managerial Behaviors in the Mutual Fund Industry

Two Essays on Managerial Behaviors in the Mutual Fund Industry
Author: Leng Ling
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2008
Genre: Mutual funds
ISBN:

Essay 1. Does mutual fund window-dressing promote fund flows?--I investigate the effectiveness of window-dressing as a potential strategy to be used by mutual fund managers to promote fund flows. Using a rank gap measure as a proxy for the likelihood that window-dressing has occurred, I find that fund investors as whole punish those managers who are suspected to have engaged in window-dressing. That is, I find a negative relation between the window-dressing measure and net fund flows in subsequent quarters after controlling for fund performance, size, expense ratio, and other pertinent characteristics. I also find that window-dressing leads to higher trading activities and lower fund performance. Essay 2. A life cycle analysis of performance and growth in U.S. mutual funds--I propose a five-stage growth model to describe the life cycle evolution of mutual funds and show that mutual funds exhibit distinctive performance, size, expense ratios, asset turnover, and other pertinent characteristics through stages of incubation, high-growth, low-growth, maturity, and decline. I also investigate the viability of managerial strategies to affect a fund's life cycle evolution and find that changing a declining fund's investment objective is effective in rejuvenating asset growth and thus repositioning the fund to younger life cycle stages. However, the strategy of adding portfolio managers appears to have no such rejuvenation effect.

Risk Taking by Mutual Funds as a Response to Incentives

Risk Taking by Mutual Funds as a Response to Incentives
Author: Judith A. Chevalier
Publisher:
Total Pages: 53
Release: 1995
Genre: Mutual funds
ISBN:

This paper examines the agency conflict between mutual fund investors and mutual fund companies. Investors would like the fund company to use its judgement to maximize risk-adjusted fund returns. A fund company, however, in its desire to maximize its value as a concern has an incentive to take actions which increase the inflow of investment. We use a semiparametric model to estimate the shape of the flow-performance relationship for a sample of growth and growth and income funds observed over the 1982-1992 period. The shape of the flow-performance relationship creates incentives for fund managers to increase or decrease the riskiness of the fund which are dependent on the fund's year-to-date return. Using a new dataset of mutual fund portfolios which includes equity portfolio holdings for September and December of the same year, we show that mutual funds do alter their portfolio riskiness between September and December in a manner consistent with these risk incentives

Essays on Mutual Fund Performance and Predictability

Essays on Mutual Fund Performance and Predictability
Author: Yu Xia
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022
Genre:
ISBN:

"This thesis consists of two essays on evaluating mutual fund performance and its predictability. In the first essay, I study the ex ante predictability of 12 well-known predictors for fund performance from investors' perspective. The 12 predictors cover three major categories: fund characteristics, fund performance, and holding-based activeness measures, which are constructed using real-time information. For performance evaluation, I exploit two types of fund picking strategies with either rule-based approach or machine learning methods and find that utilizing machine learning can deliver superior real-time economic gains for investors with fund short-term performance being the primary driver underlying predictability. Specifically, using variable selection methods such as LASSO and elastic net at individual predictor level can generate annual 1.3%-1.7% real-time alphas after adjusting for standard risk factors. The essay further examines whether real-world investors react to those well-known predictors when evaluating mutual fund performance. Using a novel approach to decomposing fund returns, I find that conditional on investors' usage of CAPM, investors react to the components of CAPM alpha implied by predictors in different ways, and investor reaction to predictive information embedded in predictors is stronger within aggressive growth funds. These results provide empirical support for Gârleanu and Pedersen (2018) and suggest ex ante predictability exists not due to lack of investor reaction but as the compensation for employing costly algorithms to identify skilled managers.The second essay examines how decision-making hierarchy in team-managed U.S. equity mutual funds affects their performance and risk-taking behavior. Employing a unique hand-collected dataset, we find that vertically-managed funds with lead managers earn 75 bps per year lower Fama-French five-factor alpha than their horizontally-managed counterparts. Moreover, vertically-managed funds hold less concentrated portfolios and are exposed to lower residual risk, thus showing signs of inferior security selection ability. Using mutual fund industry as a laboratory, the second essay provides evidence supporting a horizontal decision-making structure in organizations functioning in an uncertain expectation environment. These results echo similar mechanisms as in recent cross-country studies on the benefits of democratic form of government for country's economic growth"--