We examine gross flows to mutual funds and find that existing investors punish poorly performing funds by increasing outflows. We also find that existing and potential investors punish poorly performing funds by reducing inflows. Finally, we uncover that current investors respond to poor...

Using a large sample of monthly gross flows from 1997 to 2003, we uncover several previously undocumented regularities in investor behavior. First investor purchases and sales produce fund-level gross flows that are highly persistent. Persistence in fund flows dominates performance as a...

The non-linear relation between mutual fund performance and subsequent net flows is well documented in the mutual fund literature. The extant literature generally ascribes the absence of net outflows in the face of poor performance to inactivity by existing fund investors (i.e., they do not to...

We address the practical question of whether investors and researchers are likely to make invalid inferences about fund manager performance when using the wrong model and/or benchmark. We consider three well-known models, those of Jensen (1968), Treynor and Mazuy (1966), and Henriksson and...

We extend the variance decomposition model of Campbell (1991) to allow for time-varying stock market volatility. Specifically, we introduce a model in which the covariance matrix of the vector autoregression (VAR) follows a multivariate stochastic volatility (MSV) process. This VAR-MSV model...