Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of financial literacy, risk attitude, and saving motives on the attenuation of mutual fund investors’ disposition bias. Specifically, ...the authors focus on individual characteristics explaining the investors’ propensity to sell shares in a poorly performing mutual fund.
Design/methodology/approach
The study relies on survey data collected from 1,564 Swedish households in 2013. The authors test the hypotheses considering three different portfolio compositions and portfolio performances. Each composition corresponds to a dependent variable and a separate model which are estimated using ordinal logistic regression.
Findings
The authors find that different forms of financial literacy affect attenuation of the disposition effect. Specifically, the authors find that knowledge about mutual funds and knowledge about current market conditions affect the attenuation of the disposition effect, whereas the authors find no support for the effect of “technical financial knowledge” (e.g. the ability to calculate compound interest rates). The authors also find no support for the effects of risk attitude and saving motives on the attenuation of the disposition bias.
Originality/value
The findings suggest a need for a more fine-grained conceptualization of the financial literacy concept and its effect on investors’ disposition bias. Since an important implication of the findings is that financial literacy could potentially help people overcome behavioral bias, the study provides insights for policymakers as well as into the discussion on the design of consumer education programs.
Applying a geographic lens to mutual fund performance, this study finds that fund managers earn substantial abnormal returns in nearby investments. These returns are particularly strong among funds ...that are small and old, focus on few holdings, and operate out of remote areas. Furthermore, we find that while the average fund exhibits only a modest bias toward local stocks, certain funds strongly bias their holdings locally and exhibit even greater local performance. Finally, we demonstrate that the extent to which a firm is held by nearby investors is positively related to its future expected return. Our results suggest that investors trade local securities at an informational advantage and point toward a link between such trading and asset prices.
We ask whether loads affect investment flows in the US mutual fund industry. We argue that sales fees make the investment decision partially irreversible. Under these circumstances investors await ...for a stronger signal of managerial ability before committing to a new fund. This stronger signal can take the form of a particularly strong performance or a particularly long series of positive performance realizations. Looking at pairs of fund shares with the same portfolio but different sales fee arrangements we show that investment flows in share classes with front loads react disproportionally to good performances (higher convexity in the flow-performance relationship) and react to performance realizations further back in time (longer memory). A counterfactual example of fund shares with back-end loads allows us to rule out the hypothesis that this behavior is due to the incentive structure of brokers. Finally we show that these behavioral modifications induced by front loads have a negative and significant effect on investors’ timing ability.
We propose a measure of dispersion in fund managers׳ beliefs about future stock returns based on their active holdings, i.e., deviations from benchmarks. We find that both the level of and the change ...in dispersion positively predict subsequent stock returns on a risk-adjusted basis. This effect is particularly pronounced among stocks with high information asymmetry and binding short-sale constraints. These results suggest that a subgroup of informed managers drives up the dispersion in active holdings when they place large bets after receiving positive private information. Binding short-sale constraints, however, prevent them from fully using their negative private information, leading to low dispersion in active holdings.
Some mutual funds purchase stocks before dividend payments to artificially increase their dividends, which we call “juicing.” Funds paid more than twice the dividends implied by their holdings in ...7.4% of fund-years examined. Juicing is associated with larger inflows, and is more common among funds with unsophisticated investors. This behavior is consistent with an underlying investor demand for dividends, but is hard to explain by taxes or need for income, as funds can generate equivalent tax-free distributions by returning capital. Juicing is costly to investors through higher turnover and increased taxes of 0.57% to 1.52% of fund assets per year.
We show that institutional shareholders of acquiring companies on average do not lose money around public merger announcements, because they hold substantial stakes in the targets and make up for the ...losses from the acquirers with the gains from the targets. Depending on their holdings in the target, acquirer shareholders generally realize different returns from the same merger, some losing money and others gaining. This conflict of interest is reflected in the mutual fund voting behavior: In mergers with negative acquirer announcement returns, cross-owners are significantly more likely to vote for the merger.
We empirically investigate the effect of the centrality of mutual funds (MFs) on the holding network of each listed firm in cross-province acquisitions in China using a unique dataset covering the ...2010-2019 period. We find a positive association between the centrality of MFs and the likelihood and value of cross-province acquisitions made by the listed firm, especially when the central blockholder MF pays corporate site visits, when target firms are difficult for the acquirer to reach, and when the central blockholder MF is low-risk or high-performance. We also show that blockholder centrality improves the market valuation and post-acquisition performance of cross-province acquisitions. These results support the notion that a MF with the largest blockholder centrality increases the value of the listed firms it owns by alleviating information asymmetry in cross-province acquisitions. Collectively, our evidence highlights the advisory role of a blockholder network for listed firms.
The literature is rich with examples of price clustering in financial markets. This study focuses on the relation between mutual fund ownership (both active and passive) and stock price clustering. ...To the extent that mutual funds are sophisticated investors, we posit that their trades are associated with lower levels of price clustering. We find support for this hypothesis as total, active, and passive mutual fund ownership are negatively related to the degree of price clustering. Surprisingly, price clustering’s association to passive (e.g. index) mutual fund ownership is an order of magnitude greater than to active ownership.
In this study, we provide a comprehensive examination of the performance of financial (specialty sector financial) mutual funds over a 23-year period, a much longer time frame than what has been ...analyzed in previous literature. To fully understand the performance of these mutual funds, we consider multiple factors, including risk-adjusted performance, both unconditional and conditional multifactor analysis, and market timing and selectivity. Financial mutual funds have higher risk-adjusted performance than the overall market and financial sector benchmarks. However, fund alphas are not different from zero, and managers do not exhibit market timing or security selection abilities. Our analysis not only includes the overall performance of these mutual funds, but we also delve into sub-samples before and after the 2008 financial crisis and during the recent Coronavirus pandemic.
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