Title of dissertation: ESSAYS ON MUTUAL FUNDS Nitin Kumar, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Dissertation directed by: Professor Russ Wermers Department of Finance Robert H. Smith School of Business This dissertation comprises of three essays on mutual funds. In the first essay, I test whether fund investors rationally incorporate portfolio manager ownership disclosure in their portfolio allocation de...

It is a well-known fact that actively managed mutual funds on average underperform passive benchmarks. In this paper, we use the stochastic dominance test proposed by Linton, Maasoumi, and Whang (2005) to shed new light on mutual fund performance on average and across styles. This test evaluates mutual fund performance using a non-parametric framework that 1) imposes a minimal set of conditions...

Mutual funds hold 32% of the U.S. equity market and comprise 58% retirement savings, yet retail investors consistently make poor choices when selecting funds. Theory suggests are partially due to fund managers creating unnecessarily complex disclosures fee structures keep uninformed obfuscate performance. An empirical challenge in investigating this “strategic obfuscation” theory is isolating m...

Abstract The research aimed to check whether investment fund managers maintain costs similarly from period period. verified the hypothesis that in subsequent periods at a similar level. study used method based on contingency tables which are analyse persistence of performance. In this study, we replaced performance with costs, assuming also control these values. Costs were defined as: (1) total...

One of the main functionalities of capital market is to improve liquidityin the market which provides security for the investors. Mutual funds aremodern financial institutions which are designed with the aim of collectingfunds from investors and devote them to buy a variety of securities inorder to mitigate investment risks, exploit the economies of scale andfinally create a reasonable return f...