Author: Claudia Peitzmeier
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Qing Yan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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This dissertation investigates the performance of hedge funds and actively managed U.S. equity mutual funds. The first chapter examines the relation between hedge funds and the low beta anomaly. Different conditions in the mutual fund and hedge fund industries should lead to different approaches with respect to the low beta anomaly. I find that, unlike most mutual funds, the average hedge fund tends to benefit considerably from the anomaly. About 2.3% per year of apparent alpha for the average hedge fund can be attributed to the low beta anomaly rather than manager skill. Low skill managers are the most reliant on the anomaly to generate returns, with the most reliant underperforming the least reliant by 5.9% per year. The second chapter uses machine learning to dynamically identify and optimally combine the predictors of hedge fund performance. The portfolio formed based on the machine learning models has an out-of-sample alpha of 7.8% per year. The importance of each predictor varies over time, but among the 22 predictors I consider, the consistently important predictors are average return, maximum return, alpha, systematic risk, and beta activity. Machine learning provides valuable, unique information about future hedge fund performance that is not captured by individual predictors. The third chapter studies whether the quality of fund risk management can predict fund performance. I find that the risk management skills of mutual fund managers-as quantified by their funds' maximum drawdowns-are persistent and predictive of subsequent risk-adjusted performance. Funds with relatively strong past performance and relatively low past maximum drawdowns have, on average, an out-of-sample alpha of 2.68% per year. That alpha is magnified when markets are turbulent-a time during which risk management skills should be most valuable. Investors are averse to drawdown risk. After controlling for typical measures of past performance, fund flows are still a decreasing function of maximum drawdowns, particularly among investors with greater risk aversion and during times of generally heightened risk aversion.

Author: Ivan Stetsyuk
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Agency theory suggests that information asymmetry between mutual fund managers and mutual fund investors can be mitigated if managers are compensated for the private information that influences mutual fund risk and performance. This study investigates the role of active management in influencing returns and return volatility of mutual funds. Chapter 1 investigates whether real estate mutual funds (REMFs) outperform Carhart's (1997) four-factor and index benchmarks using daily return data from the CRSP survivorship bias-free mutual fund database from September 1998 to December 2013. We employ generalized autoregressive conditionally heteroscedastic (GARCH) volatility models to estimate more precise alphas than those generated in the extant studies. We document that risk-adjusted alphas of actively managed REMFs are statistically and economically significant, reflecting the informational advantage and skills of active managers. We also show that actively managed REMFs outperform the real estate index benchmark (Ziman Real Estate Index) and generate a yearly buy-and-hold abnormal return of 3.64%. Active management, therefore, provides value beyond the diversification benefits that can be generated by investing into the real estate index. While active managers of REMFs generate abnormal returns (gross of expenses), they capture the entire amount themselves, sharing none with investors (net of expenses). Accordingly, the average abnormal return to investors is close to zero due to expenses associated with REMFs, such as management fees, 12b-1 fees, waivers, and reimbursements. Finally, we find that passively managed REMFs do not generate abnormal risk-adjusted alphas in Carhart's (1997) four-factor model. Chapter 2 examines managed volatility mutual funds (MVMFs) that utilize a range of investment strategies focused on portfolio volatility. These funds have increased in popularity in the wake of the financial crisis (December 2007 to June 2009) which introduced considerable volatility into the markets. We test whether MVMFs provide better performance during periods of recessions and expansions as compared to conventional mutual funds (MFs). We obtain several interesting results. First, MVMFs underperform compared to conventional MFs by more than 2% during the entire sample period. Second, MVMFs outperform conventional MFs in recessions by over 4% annually. Third, MVMFs underperform conventional MFs by more than 2.5% during expansions. Our results suggest that MVMFs can benefit investors during periods of recessions at the cost of performing worse during expansions. Chapter 3 studies MF return volatility patterns by testing a host of hypotheses for MFs with various style objectives. To conduct the tests, we use daily returns data from the CRSP survivorship bias-free mutual fund database from September 1998 to December 2013. We examine volatility patterns across the following nine styles: Passively Managed, Actively Managed, Sector, Capitalization, Growth and Income, Income, Growth, Hedged, and Dedicated Short Bias. We employ the exponential generalized autoregressive conditionally heteroscedastic (EGARCH) volatility model. Several results are obtained. First, we show that the financial crisis of 2007-2009 had a positive or a negative impact on volatility, depending on the investment style. Second, MF volatility behavior exhibits significant cluster effects in all styles, indicating that larger return shocks lead to greater increases in return volatility. Third, shock-persistence patterns differ across various MF styles with shocks to Dedicated Short Bias MFs being the least persistent and Capitalization and Growth and Income being the most persistent. Lastly, there is considerable negative asymmetry in MF return volatility changes in response to good and bad news in the sense that negative shocks to MF returns increase volatility more than positive shocks of the same magnitude for many Actively Managed MF styles. Significant negative asymmetry of this type makes the industry vulnerable to market downturns and should be addressed by regulators, MF managers, and investors.

Author: Gulnara R. Zaynutdinova
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Chapter two investigates timing abilities of alpha-opportunities by mutual fund managers. Active portfolio management is costly and may not deliver higher net returns to investors in the absence of sufficient alpha-opportunities when, e.g., stock returns are predominantly driven by systematic factors and highly correlated. Thus, mutual funds should engage in less active trading when stock valuation is expected to be less divergent. Our results show that mutual funds on average have the ability timing alpha-opportunities, with large-value and large-growth funds exhibiting the strongest timing skill. The results are robust when we control for past fund flows and returns, macroeconomic variables, and other potential timing skills. More importantly, funds with significantly positive timing skill earn 0.05% higher monthly returns, as measured by four-factor alpha, in subsequent month than those with negative timing skill. Our study contributes to the existing literature by proposing a novel measure to assess an important attribute of mutual fund active management ability.

Author: Ulf Herrmann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Author: Ziwei Zhao (Researcher in economics)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Exchange traded funds
Languages : en
Pages : 131

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The three essays of my dissertation are in the asset pricing area. The first essay is on the topic of how the popularity of ETFs affects active mutual funds. The second essay is about individuals' risk preferences and how early childhood experience can shape one's risk preference. The third essay is on whether active managers' education can affect their skills. Recently, the media frequently quotes active managers who claim that ETFs impede their ability of generating prots. They argue that ETFs are draining liquidity from the market and making it harder for them to generate alphas. However, a recent paper by Ben-David et al.(2018) argues that ETFs generate new inefficiencies into the underlying stocks in ETFs. Thus the popularity of ETFs should provide more opportunities for active managers to generate alpha. My first essay find that the popularity of ETFs prompts active mutual fund managers to conduct more informed trades that generate alphas. Specifically, the trades of skilled active managers better predict the future performance of stocks after the passive ownership in those stocks increase. This paper directly addresses the question of whether ETF ownership affects market efficiency by considering new inefficiencies caused by passive ETFs and whether those inefficiencies create arbitrage opportunities for active mutual funds. The second essay (co-authored) studies how our early childhood interactions with parents shape our risk preferences. Specifically, recent literature argues that only the more recent macro-economic experiences matters in shaping our risk-taking behaviors (Malmendier and Nagel, 2011), which indicates that one's earlier childhood experience is not important. Using an IV setting, we find that parents' risk-taking positively affects children's risk-taking. More importantly, exploiting a finding that parents spend more quality time with their first child, we find that this effect we identified comes mainly from one's childhood interaction with her parents, confirming a nurturing channel. This parental effect doesn't fade away with time/when children move away from parents. The third essay looks at how a mutual fund manager's early personal experience, education, affects her skills to generate performance. By showing active mutual fund managers perform better in industries that are related to their education major, this paper provides evidence that active managers have skills in those industries that they have expertise in. The first essay focuses on the institutional investors; the second essay focuses on individual investors and their early experience; while the third essay links the first two by looking at one's early experience and how it affects institutional investors such as active fund managers.

Author: Jin Xu (doctor of finance.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Capitalists and financiers
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Two essays on the stock preference and performance of institutional investors are included in the dissertation. In the first essay, I document that mutual fund managers and other institutional investors tend to hold stocks with higher betas. This effect holds even after precisely controlling for stocks' risk characteristics such as size, book-to-market equity ratio and momentum. This is contrary to the widely accepted view that betas are no longer associated with expected returns. However, these results support my simple model where a fund manager's payoff function depends on returns in excess of a benchmark. For the manager, on the one hand, he tends to load up with high beta stocks since he wants to co-move with the market and other factors as much as possible. On the other hand, the manager faces a trade-off between expected performance and the volatility of tracking error. My model thus shows that the manager prefers to choose higher beta than his benchmark, and that his beta choice has an optimal level which depends on his perceived factor returns and volatility. My empirical findings further confirm the model results. First, I show that the effect of managers holding higher beta stocks is robust to a number of alternative explanations including the effects of their liquidity selection or trading activities. Second, consistent with the model predictions of managers sticking close to their benchmarks during risky periods, I demonstrate that the average beta choice of mutual fund managers can predict future market volatility, even after controlling for other common volatility predictors, such as lagged volatility and implied volatility. The second essay is the first to explicitly address the performance of actively managed mutual funds conditioned on investor sentiment. Almost all fund size quintiles subsequently outperform the market when sentiment is low while all of them underperform the market when sentiment is high. This also holds true after adjusting the fund returns by various performance benchmarks. I further show that the impact of investor sentiment on fund performance is mostly due to small investor sentiment. These findings can partially validate the existence of actively managed mutual funds which underperform the market overall (Gruber 1996). In addition, when conditioning on investor sentiment, the pattern of decreasing returns to scale in mutual funds, recently documented in Chen, Hong, Huang, and Kubik (2004), is fully reversed when sentiment is high while the pattern persists and is more pronounced when sentiment is low. Further results suggest that smaller funds tend to hold smaller stocks, which is shown to drive the above patterns. I also document that smaller funds have more sentiment timing ability or feasibility than larger funds. These findings have many important implications including persistence of fund performance which may not exist under conventional performance measures.

Author: Steve A. Nenninger
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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This dissertation examines mutual fund performance from the points of view of three distinct, but interrelated parties: individual investors, financial advisors, and the boards of directors of mutual fund companies. In the first essay, the flow-performance sensitivity of no-load funds and the three main classes of load fund shares are compared, assuming investment advisors are more likely to guide the decision-making process of load fund investors. In the second essay, the timing of the decision to replace fund managers is examined. In the third essay, performance of actively managed mutual funds are separately examined during good and bad states of the market to test whether mutual funds perform differently under different market conditions.

Author: Hongxun Ruan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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In the first chapter, "Social Capital and Innovation: Evidence from Connected Holdings," I investigates how social capital affects innovation. I measure a firm's social capital with connected holdings, which is the fraction of equity of a particular firm held by mutual funds whose managers are connected to the firm's board members through educational networks. I use plausibly exogenous variation in the size of board members' networks as an instrument for connected holdings. I find higher connected holdings lead to larger number of patents granted, more patent citations, and higher firm value created by patents. Connected holdings foster innovation by helping to reduce short-term capital market pressures and to increase management job security. The second chapter, "Marketing Mutual Funds," co-authored with Nikolai Roussanov and Yanhao Wei, we investigate marketing and distribution expenses' impact on the allocation of capital to funds and on returns earned by mutual fund investors. We develop and estimate a structural model of costly investor search and fund competition with learning about fund skill and endogenous marketing expenditures. We find that marketing is nearly as important as performance and fees for determining fund size. Restricting the amount that funds can spend on marketing substantially improves investor welfare, as more capital is invested with passive index funds and price competition decreases fees on actively managed funds. Average alpha increases as active fund size is reduced, and the relationship between fund size and fund manager skill net of fees is closer to that implied by a frictionless model. Decreasing investor search costs would also imply a reduction in marketing expenses and management fees as well as a shift towards passive investing.

Author: Zhi Wang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Investments
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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