Incentives and Mutual Fund Performance: Higher Performance or Just Higher Risk Taking?

We study the impact of contractual incentives on the performance of mutual funds. We find that high-incentive contracts induce managers to take more risk and reduce the funds' probability of survival. Yet, funds with high-incentive contracts deliver higher risk-adjusted return, and the superior performance remains persistent. The top incentive quintile of funds outperforms the bottom quintile by 2.70% per year. Moreover, high-incentive winner funds from one year have a positive alpha of 0.41% per month in the following year. Focusing on funds' holdings, we show that active portfolio rebalancing is the main channel through which incentives increase performance. The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.