This paper examines the relationship between mutual fund managers' past professional backgrounds and their portfolio performance, using Chinese mutual fund data from 2003 to 2016. We focus on managers with prior work experience either as industry analysts or as macro analysts, the two most...

In this study, we investigate the mutual fund managers' ability to time market coskewness. Analyzing nine investment styles of US equity fund, we find strong evidence to support that between 1973 and 2018, mutual fund managers investing in Small-Blend and Small-Growth schemes demonstrate the...

The aims of this paper are to detect evidence of institutional investor herding behaviour and examine the role that investor sentiment plays in the institutional investor herd behaviour. We use bivariate GARCH method estimated time varying beta to estimate herding variables of UK open-ended and...

This paper provides new evidence about returns to scale in asset management, and their connection with capital flows to funds by investors. Equity mutual funds have diminishing returns to scale at the industry level, while hedge and fixed income funds have increasing returns to scale. The...

We examine the impact of social ties between mutual fund managers and auditors of public firms on mutual fund stockholdings. We find that mutual funds whose managers are socially connected with firm auditors hold more shares of these firms. In cross-sectional results consistent with...

I show that investors misallocate a substantial amount of capital in the active mutual fund industry. To this end, I develop a novel structural identification strategy to estimate the returns to scale in active management and the time-varying fund skills. A median fund is over-allocated by $29...

We examine the role of peer (e.g., Lipper indices) vs. pure (i.e., market indices) benchmarks in the compensation contract of mutual fund managers. We first model the impact of peer vs. pure benchmarks on fund manager incentives. Then, using a unique hand-collected dataset, we test the...

This study brings to light the new empirical fact that flows into US domestic equity mutual funds depend less on past fund returns when the risk-free rate declines. A one-percent drop in interest rates is associated with a decrease in the slope of the flow-performance relationship of around 10%....

A low-interest rate environment induces higher demand for income-generating assets, such as high-dividend stocks and high-coupon bonds. In this paper, we explore the impact of this “reaching-for-income” phenomenon on fund flows of corporate bond mutual funds. We find that high...

Behavioral finance lacks direct evidence linking agents’ beliefs to their behaviors. Motivated by revealed preference theories, I provide such evidence using mutual fund stock holdings. Assuming that investors' expectations are consistent with their investment decisions, I relate fund...