Browsing by Subject "Mutual funds"
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Item Advertising mutual funds : new evidence from 401(k) investment allocations(2022-05-06) Dolatabadi, Iman; Starks, Laura T.; Sialm, Clemens; Fracassi, Cesare; Srinivasan, RajiThis dissertation studies the role of advertising in the mutual fund industry. I use comprehensive advertising data along with hand-collected data on the menu of investment options offered to 401(k) plan participants to disentangle the informative and persuasive roles of advertising. I first establish that advertising significantly increases investor flows at the family and individual fund levels. To alleviate endogeneity concerns, I use non-fund ads placed by the parent company of each mutual fund family and ads by political campaigns as exogenous shocks to advertising. I further provide evidence for persuasive advertising in this market: First, fund family advertising is not affected by the family's lagged performance. Thus, it is not the case that when fund families perform well, they advertise more. Second, higher fund family advertising expenditures are not correlated with better post-advertising performance, indicating that a higher advertising budget does not signal higher unobservable managerial skill. Finally, advertising affects flows even if investors have a limited set of investment options where historical returns and fees are disclosed in a standardized format. I develop and estimate a structural demand model and show that demand is 55% less sensitive to expense ratios and 48% less sensitive to past returns when a fund family advertises, suggesting that persuasion is an important reason why mutual fund families advertise. Misguided financial decisions caused by persuasive advertising are particularly important in this market as they can have long-term consequences such as lower wealth during retirement.Item Determinants of mutual fund flows(2011-05) Gallaher, Steven Timothy; Starks, Laura T.; Titman, Sheridan; Almazan, Andres; Anderson, Edward; Hartzell, JayI investigate mutual fund flows at the individual fund and at the fund family level. At the individual, I use SEC filings to decompose fund flows into inflows and outflows. This decomposition of net flows into its component parts provides a way to examine differences in how search costs and investor learning affect investors who are entering a fund (or adding to their investments) versus those investors who are leaving a fund (or decreasing their investments). I then examine the effect of the existence of an advertisement for the fund on these investors. At the mutual fund family level, I examine how the characteristics and performance of mutual fund families affect the flows to the family as a whole. I then examine the effects of advertising expenditures on flows to the fund family.Item Essays on mutual funds(2020-08-12) Kang, Xiang; Sialm, Clemens; Alti, Aydogan; Xiaolan, Mindy; Zhao, WuyangThis dissertation is composed of two empirical studies on mutual funds. Chapter 1 studies the implication of the timing of mutual fund entry for subsequent long-term fund performance. As fund companies choose when to open new funds and what investment styles they practice, these choices may be informative about the fund qualities. I empirically explore the relation between entrant fund performance and past style performance. By examining a sample of 2,801 mutual fund entrant during the period of 1991--2015, I find that entrant funds with investment styles that have recently performed well tend to underperform in the future. The post-entry performance of hot style entrants is worse than both the post-entry performance of cold style entrants and the concurrent performance of incumbents in the same style categories. The empirical findings are unlikely to be driven by stock-level return reversals or competition among mutual funds, but consistent with fund investors practicing style investing and extrapolating their beliefs on style returns, leading to lower entry thresholds for fund managers in hot investment styles. Chapter 2 includes my joint work with David Xiaoyu Xu on how regulations in the Chinese stock market can affect investor behavior in the mutual fund market. We show that trading suspension, a regulatory policy on stock trading activities, gives rise to stale mutual fund NAVs and indirectly affects fund investors' behavior. Using a sample of 3,205 long-term trading suspension events in China during 2004--2018, we find that opportunistic investors combine firm-specific news and fund portfolio reports to make investment decisions. Quarterly fund flows positively respond to suspended portfolio stocks' unrealized impact on fund NAVs. Such responses are stronger for impactful good news, and portfolio disclosure plays a key role in this mechanism. Our findings suggest the need for a better integrated financial regulatory framework in emerging markets.Item Essays on the impact of institutional investors on market efficiency and corporate policies(2008-05) Sulaeman, Johan Arifin; Altı, Aydoğan; Titman, SheridanIn this dissertation, I explore the determinants and implications of the preferences of institutional investors. First, I examine whether institutional investors' preference for local investments is related to informational advantage. Analyzing the equity holdings of a large sample of actively managed mutual funds, I find evidence consistent with the mutual fund industry having a perception that local funds have an informational advantage. However, the portfolio of mutual funds' local holdings does not display significant superior performance relative to the portfolio of their distant holdings. Using a parsimonious model, I hypothesize that the profitability of local informational advantage will be low due to the price impact of trading when there is a relatively large population of local agents who trade on similar private information. Consistent with this hypothesis, I find that funds do earn superior returns on local stocks for which local capital is limited and hence the price impact of local trades is likely to be small. Second, I examine the preferences of institutional investors for firm policies and the relationship between these preferences and firm decisions. I find that institutional investors exhibit systematic differences in their preferences for financial and investment policies. Furthermore, these preferences are related to subsequent changes in the financial and investment policies of the firms they invest. In particular, a firm is more likely to decrease (increase) its leverage ratio if its current leverage is higher (lower) than the preferences of its institutional shareholders. A firm is also more likely to increase (decrease) its investment if its current investment ratio is lower (higher) than the preferences of its institutional shareholders. These findings suggest that the preferences of institutional shareholders are important determinants of corporate policies.Item Evaluation and comparison of management strategies by Data Envelopment Analysis with an application to mutual funds(2006) Wilson, Chester L.; Cooper, William W.; Ruefli, Timothy W.A new categorical schema for strategic management is developed; a methodology for its implementation is elaborated; an application to mutual funds based on microeconomic theory is demonstrated; and results which establish quantitative measures for evaluating strategies, improve measures of managerial performance, and establish a new viii method of evaluating portfolio performance with guidance for potential mutual fund shareholders is presented. The evaluation of strategies themselves depends fundamentally on distinguishing them from their execution, from their realization in practice. The accounting definition of strategy, “a plan of action used to guide or control other plans of action” finds an observable, indeed measurable, example in the strategic choices of mutual funds, which are required by law to declare and conform to the general strategy by which they conduct investment management. The methodology to exploit the declared strategies and performance data of mutual funds is Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), a nonparametric linear programming method of analysis for use with empirical data. By producing a piecewise linear frontier based on the Pareto-Koopmans efficient performers, DEA provides a basis for measuring performances and facilitates sensitivity analysis. Data Envelopment Analysis measures assume no prior, underlying functional form (such as regression equations or production functions) to relate input to output or to other variables. An evaluation of a selected group of mutual funds illustrates the general DEA method and evaluates the actual performance of the funds. Then a new application involving an extended, three-stage Data Envelopment Analysis separates the performance of the investment strategies from the effects of managerial shortcomings and abilities to implement the strategies. This makes it possible to separately identify and evaluate what a strategy can accomplish. It also makes it possible to evaluate separately short-run from ix long-run performance. Finally, DEA identifies benchmarking possibilities for removing these short-run deficiencies. This new method for evaluating strategies and shortcomings in performance is demonstrated by application to mutual funds, which display striking contrasts in managerial performance and strategic potential. Although demonstrated with mutual funds, this method is not restricted to such applications. Indeed, the methods in this thesis provide a new way of evaluating investment potentials by distinguishing between actual short-run performance and long-run potentials.Item Fragile liquidity : analysis of the mutual fund liquidity risk management rule(2022-04-18) Park, Hyunggyu Tim; Sialm, Clemens; Starks, Laura; Kruger, Samuel; Zhao, WuyangThis dissertation studies the unintended consequences of the Liquidity Risk Management Rule adopted by the SEC in 2016. The rule imposes an upper bound for illiquid assets and a lower bound for liquid assets in mutual fund portfolios. In response to the regulation, corporate bond mutual funds shift their portfolios toward liquid corporate bonds. The ownership shift to liquid corporate bonds increases the comovement among the underlying liquid assets, and higher comovement among liquid corporate bonds increases the volatility in liquid corporate bond funds. However, I find little evidence of stabilized fund flows. Overall, reducing fragility in mutual funds using portfolio constraints has unintended consequences.Item Media coverage of mutual funds(2006-12-23) Vasudevan, Vasudha; Starks, Laura T.The principal focus of this dissertation is to investigate the role of media coverage in the investment decisions of mutual fund investors and the consequent effects on flows into the funds. I examine investor attention and learning effects by examining the relation between media coverage of mutual funds and the net investor flows to the funds. Using a database of nearly 10,000 news articles, I find that the existence and stance of media coverage affects net investor flows into the fund in ways consistent with investor attention and learning. Further, the media coverage does not have a uniform effect on flows. News articles with positive (negative) tones are associated with significant increases (decreases) in flows. I find that fund size and past performance influence the impact of media coverage on mutual fund flows. I also find that, as a fund ages and investors receive additional news about the fund, there are smaller effects from the news. This is consistent with the hypothesis that investors learn about funds through media coverage and that this knowledge affects their investment behavior. These results suggest that media coverage can have significant economic effects on mutual funds through the effects on investors' attention and learning.Item Three essays on mutual funds(2017-05) Guo, Xuemei; Sialm, Clemens; Abrevaya, Jason; Zhang, Xiaolan; Oettinger, GeraldThis 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.