Financial economics and corporate governance have long focused on the agency problems between corporate managers and shareholders that result from the dispersion of ownership in large publicly traded ...corporations. In this paper, we focus on how the rise of institutional investors over the past several decades has transformed the corporate landscape and, in turn, the governance problems of the modern corporation. The rise of institutional investors has led to increased concentration of equity ownership, with most public corporations now having a substantial proportion of their shares held by a small number of institutional investors. At the same time, these institutions are controlled by investment managers, which have their own agency problems vis-à-vis their own beneficial investors. We develop an analytical framework for understanding the agency problems of institutional investors, and apply it to examine the agency problems and behavior of several key types of investment managers, including those that manage mutual funds—both index funds and actively managed funds—and activist hedge funds. We show that index funds have especially poor incentives to engage in stewardship activities that could improve governance and increase value. Activist hedge funds have substantially better incentives than managers of index funds or active mutual funds. While their activities may partially compensate, we show that they do not provide a complete solution for the agency problems of other institutional investors.
Individual investor mutual fund flows Ivković, Zoran; Weisbenner, Scott
Journal of financial economics,
05/2009, Volume:
92, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This paper studies the relation between individuals’ mutual fund flows and fund characteristics, establishing three key results. First, consistent with tax motivations, individual investors are ...reluctant to sell mutual funds that have appreciated in value and are willing to sell losing funds. Second, individuals pay attention to investment costs as redemption decisions are sensitive to both expense ratios and loads. Third, individuals’ fund-level inflows and outflows are sensitive to performance, but in different ways. Inflows are related only to “relative” performance, suggesting that new money chases the best performers in an objective. Outflows are related only to “absolute” fund performance, the relevant benchmark for taxes.
Compared to matched conventional mutual funds, socially responsible mutual funds outperform during periods of market crises. This dampening of downside risk comes at the cost of underperforming ...during non-crisis periods. Investors seeking downside protection would value the asymmetry of these returns. This asymmetric return pattern is driven by the mutual funds that focus on environmental, social, or governance (ESG) attributes and is especially pronounced in ESG funds that use positive screening techniques. Furthermore, the observed patterns are attributed to the funds’ socially responsible attributes and not the differences in fund portfolio management or the characteristics of the companies in fund portfolios.
Prior theory suggests that time variation in the degree to which leverage constraints bind affects the pricing kernel. We propose a measure for this leverage constraint tightness by inverting the ...argument that constrained investors tilt their portfolios to riskier assets. We show that the average market beta of actively managed mutual funds—intermediaries facing leverage restrictions—captures their desire for leverage and thus the tightness of constraints. Consistent with theory, it strongly predicts returns of the betting-against-beta portfolio, and is a priced risk factor in the cross-section of mutual funds and stocks. Funds with low exposure to the factor outperform high-exposure funds by 5% annually, and for stocks this difference reaches 7%. Our results show that the tightness of leverage constraints has important implications for asset prices.
Traditionally, mutual funds are mostly managed via an ad hoc approach, namely a terminal‐only optimization. Due to the intricate mathematical complexity of a continuum of constraints imposed, effects ...of the inter‐temporal reward for the managers are essentially neglected in the previous literature. For instance, the inter‐temporal optimal investment problem from the fund manager's viewpoint, who earns proportional management fees continuously (a golden rule in practice), has been outstanding for long. This article completely resolves this challenging question especially under generic running and terminal utilities, via the Dynamic Programming Principle which leads to a nonconventional, highly nonlinear HJB equation. We develop an original mathematical analysis to establish the unique existence of the classical solution of the primal problem. Further numerical calibrations and simulations for both the portfolio weight and the value functions illustrate the robustness of the optimal portfolio towards the manager's risk attitude, which allows different managers with various risk characteristics to sell essentially the same investment vehicle. Simulation studies also indicate that the policy of charging a substantial terminal‐only management fee can be replaced by another one with only a negligible amount over the interim period, which substantially reduces the total management fee paid by the clients without lowering the manager's satisfaction at all; this last observation echoes the magic of the alchemy of finance.
Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) represent one of the most important financial innovations in decades. An ETF is an investment vehicle, with a specific architecture that typically seeks to track the ...performance of a specific index. The first US-listed ETF, the SPDR, was launched by State Street in January 1993 and seeks to track the S&P 500 index. It is still today the largest ETF by far, with assets of $178 billion. Following the introduction of the SPDR, new ETFs were launched tracking broad domestic and international indices, and more specialized sector, region, or country indexes. In recent years, ETFs have grown substantially in assets, diversity, and market significance, including substantial increases in assets in bond ETFs and so-called “smart beta” funds that track certain investment strategies often used by actively traded mutual funds and hedge funds. In this paper, we begin by describing the structure and organization of exchange-traded funds, contrasting them with mutual funds, which are close relatives of exchange-traded funds, describing the differences in how ETFs operate and their potential advantages in terms of liquidity, lower expenses, tax efficiency, and transparency. We then turn to concerns over whether the rise in ETFs may raise unexpected risks for investors or greater instability in financial markets. While concerns over financial fragility are worth serious consideration, some of the common concerns are overstated, and for others, a number of rules and practices are already in place that offer a substantial margin of safety.
This study proposes that the performance of mutual fund managers is linked to how efficiently they allocate attention across assets in their investment set. Motivated by existing models of optimal ...portfolio choice and rational inattention, we posit that the efficiency of attention allocation increases when a manager chooses larger (smaller) active positions in assets that need more (less) information acquisition effort to resolve uncertainty about future payoffs. We show that the efficiency of attention allocation has a significantly positive impact on future fund performance. Efficient attention allocation has a lesser impact on performance as the total demands on a manager's limited attention increase.
We investigate the dual notions that “dumb money” exacerbates well-known stock return anomalies and “smart money” attenuates these anomalies. We find that aggregate flows to mutual funds (dumb money) ...appear to exacerbate cross-sectional mispricing, particularly for growth, accrual, and momentum anomalies. In contrast, hedge fund flows (smart money) appear to attenuate aggregate mispricing. Our results suggest that aggregate flows to mutual funds can have real adverse allocation effects in the stock market and that aggregate flows to hedge funds contribute to the correction of cross-sectional mispricing.
I propose and test a capital-flow-based explanation for some well-known empirical regularities concerning return predictability—the persistence of mutual fund performance, the "smart money" effect, ...and stock price momentum. First, I construct a measure of demand shocks to individual stocks by aggregating flow-induced trading across all mutual funds, and document a significant, temporary price impact of such uninformed trading. Next, given that mutual fund flows are highly predictable, I show that the expected part of flow-induced trading positively forecasts stock and mutual fund returns in the following year, which are then reversed in subsequent years. The main findings of the paper are that the flow-driven return effect can fully account for mutual fund performance persistence and the smart money effect, and can partially explain stock price momentum.
We analyze brokerage data and an experiment to test a cognitive dissonance based theory of trading: investors avoid realizing losses because they dislike admitting that past purchases were mistakes, ...but delegation reverses this effect by allowing the investor to blame the manager instead. Using individual trading data, we show that the disposition effect—the propensity to realize past gains more than past losses—applies only to nondelegated assets like individual stocks; delegated assets, like mutual funds, exhibit a robust reverse-disposition effect. In an experiment, we show that increasing investors' cognitive dissonance results in both a larger disposition effect in stocks and a larger reverse-disposition effect in funds. Additionally, increasing the salience of delegation increases the reverse-disposition effect in funds. Cognitive dissonance provides a unified explanation for apparently contradictory investor behavior across asset classes and has implications for personal investment decisions, mutual fund management, and intermediation.
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