An intriguing observation in the US mutual fund industry is that most equity funds do not short sell, even though virtually all regulatory restrictions on selling were lifted by 1997. We shed light this puzzle conducting first systematic analysis of long-short funds’ portfolio compositions, performance, and capital flows. Our results reveal that: 1) hold substantially more cash than their long-...

This paper shows empirically that the positive association between mutual fund ownership and firm value in China is mainly driven by the informed trading of mutual funds. Utilizing the unique short term feature of mutual fund holdings for the period from 2001 to 2010, we provide an informational link between a decomposed component of market-to-book ratio (firm specific valuation component) and ...

The average level and cross-sectional variability of fund alphas are estimated from a large sample of mutual funds. This information is incorporated, along with the usual regression estimate of alpha, in a (roughly) precision-weighted average measure of individual fund performance. Substantial ‘‘learning across funds’’ is documented, with significant effects on investment decisions. In a Bayesi...

Article history: Received 5 May 2010 Received in revised form 1 February 2012 Accepted 1 March 2012 Available online 8 March 2012 We examine the ability of oneand two-factor regime switching models to describe US, developed, and emerging market mutual fund returns. We find that a two-factor fixed transition probability model adequately describes the multivariate series of mutual fund returns wi...

This paper studies daily investor flows to and from each money market mutual fund during the period surrounding and including the money fund crisis of September 2008. We focus on the determinants of flows in the prime money fund category to shed light on the covariates of money fund runs, since this category was, by far, the most heavily impacted by the money fund crisis. We find that outflows ...

This paper studies the flow-performance relationship of three different investor groups in mutual funds: Households, financial corporations, and insurance companies and pension funds, establishing the following findings: Financial corporations have a strong tendency to chase past performance and also hold an increased share in the top performing funds. Insurance companies and pension funds show...

Mutual funds are held by investors in taxable and tax-qualified retirement accounts. We investigate whether the characteristics, investment strategies, and performance of mutual funds held by these diverse tax clienteles differ. Examining both mutual fund distributions and mutual fund holdings, we find that funds held primarily by taxable investors choose investment strategies that result in lo...

In this paper, we apply nonlinear techniques (Self-Organizing Maps, k-nearest neighbors and the k-means algorithm) to evaluate the official Spanish mutual funds classification. The methodology that we propose allows us to identify which mutual funds are misclassified in the sense that they have historical performances which does not conform with the investment objectives established in their of...