We examine overconfidence among equity mutual fund managers. While overconfidence has been extensively documented among retail investors, evidence from professional investors is scarce. Consistent with theories of overconfidence, we find that fund managers trade more after good past performance....

This paper investigates whether investor sentiment can explain stock returns on the German stock market. Based on a principal component analysis, we construct a sentiment indicator that condenses information of several well-known sentiment proxies. We show that this indicator explains the return...

Rapid Trading, d.h. der kurzfristige Kauf und Verkauf von Fondsanteilen durch Fondsinvestoren, steht im Widerspruch zur Fondskonzeption, wonach Fonds Instrumente zum langfristigen Vermögensaufbau darstellen, und kann zu negativen Auswirkungen auf die Performance führen. Wir verwenden Daten...

In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden erstmals die Determinanten der Zuflüsse deutscher Aktienfonds empirisch untersucht. Für den Untersuchungszeitraum von 1991 bis 2003 finden wir einige interessante Unterschiede zum US-Markt. Zunächst bestätigen wir die in der Literatur dokumentierte positiv...

This paper provides the first empirical test of the diversification of opinions theory and the group shift theory using real business data. Our data set covers management teams and single managers of US equity mutual funds. Our results reject the group shift theory and support the...

This paper is concerned with differences in the performance-flow relationship (PFR) between standard and specialist market segments of the mutual fund industry. We expect differences in this relationship because investor characteristics might vary across different segments. Our results show that...

We examine the extent of the Status Quo Bias (SQB) in a real-world repeated decision situation. Individuals who are subject to a SQB tend to choose an alternative that was chosen previously (i.e. their status quo), even if it is not the optimal choice any more. We examine the US equity mutual...

This paper examines the influence of the position of a fund within its family on its subsequent net-inflows. Our empirical study of the US equity mutual fund market shows that reaching a top position within the family leads to large inflows. These inflows accrue beyond those expected, given the...

In this paper we examine intra-firm competition in the U.S. mutual fund industry. Our empirical study shows that fund managers within mutual fund families compete against each other. They adjust the risk they take dependent on the relative position within their fund family. The direction of the...

Due to a lack of data availability, numerous empirical studies on mutual fund flows (e.g. Sirri/Tufano (1998)) analyze synthetically derived flow measures. We show how good these measures can explain actual flows. We compare the measures suggested in the literature with the actual net-flows of...