TWO ESSAYS ON MUTUAL FUND MANAGERIAL SKILLS AND PERFORMANCE

Ao Wang

doi:10.7273/000002439

This dissertation consists of two essays that study mutual fund managerial skills and performance.Understanding whether mutual funds have skills is important as it could help investors make investment decision. My fist essay studies whether and how fund size affects managers’ risk-taking behavior in the setting of fund mergers. I test the relation between fund size and risk-shifting. The main findings are as follows. First, acquiring fund managers’ risk-taking declines as size increases resulting from mergers. The decline in risk-taking remains significant after controlling for fund characteristics, diversification effect, and portfolio’s systematic risk exposure that can be correlated with managers’ investment choices. Second, liquidity is a driving factor for the negative impact of size on managers’ risk-taking. Third, I decompose fund size into two components based on either liquidity or risk-taking and examine which component(s) correlate with fund performance. I document that risk-taking is, beyond liquidity, another underlying mechanism for decreasing returns to scale.In the second essay, I study the timing ability of mutual funds in different sentiment periods. I first use DGTW (1997) style timing measure (CT) to examine if mutual funds perform better in high sentiment periods when stock mispricing is enlarged, providing more trading opportunities for mutual funds. Results show that mutual funds have better style timing ability in high sentiment than in low sentiment. The result is robust when I use alternative sentiment measures and different model specifications. Moreover, the style timing ability in high sentiment periods is more pronounced for less expensive funds with lower turnover and active shares. Then I investigate the source of this timing ability using 9 well-known stock return anomalies. I construct an anomaly timing measure (AT) using each of the 9 individual anomalies as well as the composite anomaly. AT is developed to detect whether fund managers could successfully time a certain anomaly. I find that mutual funds have better anomaly timing ability in composite anomaly and 4 contrarian anomalies which are investment-to-assets, asset growth, composite equity issue and net operating assets. Furthermore, I provide evidence that mutual funds with better timing abilities could outperform overall.

TWO ESSAYS ON MUTUAL FUND MANAGERIAL SKILLS AND PERFORMANCE

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