Mutual Fund Flight-to-Liquidity

Mutual fund competition and stock market liquidity

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 ...

Interfund lending in mutual fund families: Role in liquidity management

Although the 1940 Act restricts interfund lending within a mutual fund family, families can apply for regulatory exemptions to participate in interfund lending. We find that heterogeneity in portfolio liquidity and investor flows across funds, funds’ investment restrictions, and governance mechanisms influence the fund family’s decision to apply for interfund lending. We document several costs ...

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...

The MUTUAL FUND INDUSTRY

Do Liquidity and Idiosyncratic Risk Matter?: Evidence from the European Mutual Fund Market

This paper examines the interaction of idiosyncratic risk, liquidity and return across time in determining fund performance, as well as across investment style portfolios of European mutual funds. This study utilizes a unique data set including returns for equity mutual funds registered in six European countries. Overall, using monthly data, we find that both liquidity and idiosyncratic risk ar...