Mutual Fund Family Size and Mutual Fund Performance: The Role of Regulatory Changes

Evaluating Mutual Fund Performance

We study standard mutual fund performance measures, using simulated funds whose characteristics mimic actual funds. We find that performance measures used in previous mutual fund research have little ability to detect economically large magnitudes ~e.g., three percent per year! of abnormal fund performance, particularly if a fund’s style characteristics differ from those of the value-weighted m...

Does Fund Size Erode Mutual Fund Performance? The Role of Liquidity and Organization

We investigate the effect of scale on performance in the active money management industry. We first document that fund returns, both before and after fees and expenses, decline with lagged fund size, even after accounting for various performance benchmarks. We then explore a number of potential explanations for this relationship. This association is most pronounced among funds that have to inve...

What determines mutual fund size?

The mutual fund industry manages about a quarter of the assets in the U.S. stock market and thus plays an important role in the U.S. economy. The question of how much control is concentrated in the hands of the largest players can be quantitatively discussed in terms of the tail behavior of the mutual fund size distribution. We study the distribution empirically and show that the tail is better...

The MUTUAL FUND INDUSTRY

Mutual Fund Performance: Evidence From the UK

This paper uses a large sample containing the complete return histories of 2300 UK openended mutual funds over a 23-year period to measure fund performance. We find some evidence of underperformance on a risk-adjusted basis by the average fund manager, persistence of performance and the existence of a substantial survivor bias. Similar findings have been reported for US equity mutual funds. New...