Abstract The concept of mutual fund emerged in Netherlands in 18th century and introduced in India by Unit Trust of India in1960s. As the mutual fund industry provides an option of diversified investment structure with varying degree of risk, it was supposed to be the most lucrative market for Indian investors. It was believed that it will surely tap the savings of common man. But in practice i...

We document that the observed persistence amongst the worst performing actively managed mutual funds is attributable to funds that have performed poorly both in the current and prior year. We demonstrate that this persistence results from an unwillingness of investors in these funds to respond to bad performance by withdrawing their capital. In contrast, funds that only performed poorly in the ...

In this paper we present an application for the construction of mutual fund portfolios. It is based on a combination of Intelligent Methods, namely an argumentation based decision making framework and a forecasting algorithm combining Genetic Algorithms (GA), MultiModel Partitioning (MMP) theory and Extended Kalman Filters (EKF). The argumentation framework is employed in order to develop mutua...

We study how competition in the mutual fund industry affects the stock market and its liquidity. We argue that mutual fund families operate as multi-product firms, jointly choosing fees, performance and number of funds. We show that competition between fund families distorts the incentives to collect information and induces the families to trade off performance and number of funds. An increase ...

We study how the strategies and performance of an asset management company are affected by its internal organizational structure. Relying on Stein’s (2002) theory of organizations, we argue that a more hierarchical structure reduces the incentives to collect “soft” information and to engage in proximity investment. This should lower portfolio concentration, increase managerial herding and reduc...

This paper explores U.S. mutual fund flows, finding strong evidence of seasonal reallocation across funds based on fund exposure to risk. We show that substantial money moves from U.S. equity to U.S. money market and government bond mutual funds in the fall, then back to equity funds in the spring, controlling for the influence of past performance, advertising, liquidity needs, capital gains ov...

We study the use of stochastic discount factor (SDF) models in evaluating the investment performance of portfolio managers. By constructing artificial mutual funds with known levels of investment ability, we evaluate a large set of SDF models. We find that the measures of performance are not highly sensitive to the SDF model, and that most of the models have a mild negative bias when performanc...

It is well known that the pro forma performance of a sample of investment funds contains biases. These biases are documented in Brown, Goetzmann, Ibbotson and Ross (1992) using mutual funds as subjects. The organization structure of hedge funds, being private and often offshore vehicles, makes data collection a much more onerous task. This amplifies the impact of performance measurement biases....

One of the most important factors shaping world outcomes is where investment dollars are placed. In this regard, there is the rapidly growing area called sustainable investing where environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) measures are taken into account. With people interested in this type of investing rarely able to gain exposure to the area other than through a mutual fund, we s...