The two main stylized facts in the mutual fund literature are that funds exhibit little ability to persistently outperform their peers, but that new money flows into funds with the highest past returns. The traditional interpretation is that fund managers are unskilled and fund investors are unsophisticated. Berk and Green (2004) offer an alternative, arguing that more-skilled managers will man...

Decentralized Investment Management: Evidence from the Pension Fund Industry The past few decades have seen a major shift from centralized to decentralized investment management by pension fund sponsors, despite the increased coordination problems that this brings. Using a unique, proprietary dataset of pension sponsors and managers, we identify two secular decentralization trends: sponsors swi...

We exploit the expiring nature of hedge fund lockups to create a dynamic, fund-level proxy of funding liquidity risk. In contrast to the prior literature, our measure allows us to identify how within-fund changes in funding liquidity risk are associated with performance and risk taking. Lockup funds with lower funding liquidity risk take more tail risk and have better risk-adjusted performance,...

We investigate the relationship of pension fund governance and investment performance. For this purpose, we develop the Swiss Pensoin Fund Governance Index (SPGI) which is a standard metric for the governance quality of Swiss pension funds. The empirical analysis is based on a sample of 96 pension funds with total assets of more than CHF 190 billion. We …nd evidence for governance issues in the...

Almost one-third of actively managed, diversified U.S. equity mutual funds specify a size and value/growth benchmark index in the fund prospectus that does not match the fund’s actual style. Nevertheless, these ‘‘mismatched’’ benchmarks matter to fund investors. Performance relative to the specified benchmark is a significant determinant of a fund’s subsequent cash inflows, even controlling for...

Background and Purpose: The study examines the effect of fund management companies’ (FMCs) attributes on FMC performance in four countries with largest number Islamic funds from 2007 to 2018.
 
 Methodology: uses pooled regression analysis 70 FMCs, comprising Saudi Arabia (25), Malaysia (20), Indonesia (14) Pakistan (11). sample is further divided into focused (IFFMC) conventional (CF...

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 ...

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...