We document a curious feature of the German mutual fund industry. Unlike U.S. mutual funds, funds domiciled in Germany do not necessarily compute their net asset values (NAV) as of market close. Using a sample of German equity funds, we infer each fund’s NAV closing time from the best-fit market model using both maximum likelihood and Bayesian estimation. The results of both approaches coincide...

We propose a method for mutual fund performance measurement and best-practice benchmarking, which endogenously identifies a dominating benchmark portfolio for each evaluated mutual fund. Dominating benchmarks provide information about efficiency improvement potential as well as portfolio strategies for achieving them. Portfolio diversification possibilities are accounts for by using Data Envelo...

We study managers who manage multiple mutual funds. Consistent with the idea that investors infer ability from past returns, flows into a fund are predicted by the past performance in another fund the multi-fund manager manages. The explanatory power of the other fund is stronger when it performed particularly well, when the two funds have similar styles, and when the manager has started managi...

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 ...

M utual fund companies selectively advertise their better-performing funds. However, investors respond to advertised performance data as if those data were unselected (i.e., representative of the population). We identify the failure to discount selected or potentially selected data as selection neglect. We examine these phenomena in an archival study (Study 1) and two controlled experiments (St...

I extend the Warther (1995) evidence to show that stock market returns are related to contemporaneous flows into mutual funds that invest in risky stocks and bonds, but are unrelated to flows into funds that invest in safer stocks and bonds. I examine whether common sources of predictability in returns and flows can explain this contemporaneous relation. I find that variables with predictive ab...

One of the main functionalities of capital market is to enhance liquidity in the market. Mutual funds are modern financial institutions which are designed with the aim of absorbing funds from investors and devote them to buy a variety of securities in order to reduce investment risks, exploit the economies of scale and finally make a reasonable return for investors. Regarding effective role of ...

In this paper we investigate how mutual funds react to the distress of another fund in the same fund family. We test three alternative hypotheses: (1) funds help the distressed fund, (2) funds front-run the distressed fund improving their relative performance in the fund family and, (3) the family coordinates and benefits from front-running the distressed fund. Our results suggest that fund man...

We estimate investment style dispersions for individual actively managed equity mutual funds, which describe how widely fund investments are distributed around the core fund style along the dimensions of size, book-to-market, and momentum, respectively. We find that high style dispersions, especially that along the size dimension, are associated with superior fund performance, consistent with h...

This paper explores the role of social networks in the portfolio allocation decisions and performance of mutual fund managers. Using a novel dataset, I examine the past employment networks of both mutual fund managers and firm executives. I find that fund managers place larger bets and perform significantly better on firms when they are connected to a senior executive of that firm through overl...