Manager characteristics : Predicting fund performance

A great deal of research effort has sought to understand whether fund managers have skill. However, most of this research draws inferences from fund returns attributable to funds that may have been managed by many different managers over the years. In this paper we focus on the fund manager. We put together a comprehensive data base of manager returns, including a time series of managers’ career returns, concatenating performance from the different funds that a manager may have managed over time. We relate these returns to the characteristics of the managers as we seek to understand whether these characteristics have an impact on: manager skill; manager style; and on performance persistence