In this paper I analyze investors’ reactions to changes in the expense ratios of equity mutual funds. I show that investment flows’ response to fees cannot be fully explained by looking at investors’ performance sensitivity. While performance sensitivity monotonically increases with past performance, price sensitivity does not: investors who buy top past performers seem to be “distracted” by th...

In this paper, structure of mutual fund, operations of mutual fund, comparison between investment in mutual fund and bank and calculation of NAV etc. have been considered. In this paper, the impacts of various demographic factors on investors’ attitude towards mutual fund have been studied. For measuring various phenomena and analyzing the collected data effectively and efficiently for drawing ...

If two advisors are listed in Thomson Mutual Fund Holdings Database, but only one of the names does not match the name of the family complex, we identify that fund as a candidate for being outsourced. Note the limitation to “candidate” because advisors with different names may still be affiliated. We carefully do this matching by hand so as to account for issues such as slight variations of nam...

We argue that mutual fund investors are more sensitive to salient in-your-face fees, like loads and commissions, than operating expenses. Our empirical analysis of mutual fund flows over the last 30 years yields strong support for our contention. We find consistently negative relations between fund flows and load fees. We also document a negative relation between fund flows and commissions char...

This study analyzes the out-of-sample performance of a variety of variables shown in prior work to forecast future mutual fund alphas. Overall, we find that the degree of predictability, as measured by alpha spreads from quintile sorts of by cross-sectional regression slopes, falls by at least half following the end of the sample and perhaps by 75% after publication. This decline is not driven ...

A number of research studies conclude that active US equity open-end mutual funds underperform on average and that overall manager skill is diminishing. This contrasts with other studies documenting systematic ways investors can identify managers who subsequently outperform. In this study, involving all active US equity mutual funds over the period February 1980 through February 2009 (resulting...

This paper employs Data Envelopment Analysis to measure for the first time the performance of Greek domestic equity mutual funds over four different one-year horizons and for the whole four-year period. In particular, the model used examines whether fund managers employ inputs (i.e. assets, loads, and risk) efficiently to produce output (returns). The results demonstrate that the efficient fund...

IE. Kandel, D. Hunter, and R. Wermers dedicate this paper to the memory of our valued friend and colleague, Shmuel Kandel, who inspired us and contributed mightily to this project. Corresponding author: R. Wermers, [email protected] (email), 301-405-0572 (tel), 301-405-0359 (fax). We gratefully acknowledge useful comments from an anonymous referee, and suggestions from the participants of the Ger...