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The purpose of this paper is probe the early data emerging from the KiwiSaver market and to draw insights on KiwiSaver investor behaviour, particularly in respect of the unique default provider feature of the scheme.

The primary source of data for this study is a purpose-built database compiled using data from KiwiSaver providers’ annual reports for the period 2009-2011.

The study finds that KiwiSaver members, like other investors, are chasing performance and seeking to avoid fees. However, an unexpected negative relation is found for bank ownership.

The key limitations of this data source include the low frequency, differing formats and levels of detail disclosed in various annual reports.

Chasing past performance indicates a need for investor education for KiwiSaver members.

The study provides an initial empirical examination of the KiwiSaver market, and the determinants of the flow of funds and members. The results can be used to guide policymakers and providers in their future decision-making around the scheme and individual offerings.

The paper aims to examine the effect of advertising on mutual fund cash flows in the Finnish fund market.

The paper's unique data set allows the observation of the effects of monetary advertising spending and the choice of advertising media.

The paper finds that neither past year's performance nor advertising alone is sufficient to produce increased cash flows. However, advertising together with past performance is found to significantly affect cash flows. The positive effect of advertising is limited to the use of non‐perishable advertising media. Additionally, it is found that fund families spending proportionately more on advertising receive higher asset flows.

The data are unique in that they can identify fund families that advertise, and also how much they spent on advertising in a given year and the dollar amount spent on five different media types. Obviously, having also fund level data available would enable more thorough analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new measure of portfolio activity, the modified turnover (MT), which represents the portion of the portfolio that the manager changes from one quarter to the next. Compared with the traditional turnover, the MT measure has a distinct interpretation, relies on portfolio holdings, includes the effects of flows and ignores the effects of offsetting trades.

Using quarterly holdings data, the authors examine the relationship between fund turnover, performance, and flows for a sample of 2,856 actively managed mutual funds over the period 1991-2012. The authors provide numerical examples to illustrate how the suggested measure, MT, is different from the traditional turnover measure. The authors use panel regressions, simple and double sorts to examine the predictability of performance.

The authors find evidence that high MT predicts lower performance. The comparison between the highest and lowest quintiles sorted based on MT reveals a difference of −2.41 percent in the annual risk-adjusted return. Furthermore, high MT predicts lower net flows. The authors also find that MT relates positively to other activeness measures while volatility, flows, size, number of stocks, and the expense ratio are significant determinants of MT. Overall, the results suggest that frequent churning of a portfolio is value destroying for investors and signals a manager’s lack of skill.

The authors offer a simple measure, namely, MT, for estimating the fraction of a portfolio that changes from one quarter to the next. Armed with this tool, the authors investigate whether funds deviate from their previous quarter’s holdings because of valuable or noisy information, and whether such signals are exploited by fund investors.

This paper aims to examine the information content of mutual fund flows and its indication on investors’ preference/tolerance toward risk.

Mutual funds are grouped into different categories based on assets with different levels of risk perceptions (e.g. equity fund, money market fund), and this information is publicly accessible. This paper examines the correlation patterns between fund flows and changes in credit default swaps (CDS) spreads. In addition, it also examines such a relation by dividing the samples into different fund types (e.g. retail vs institutional fund flows).

This paper suggests that equity fund flows are negatively related to CDS spreads, whereas money market fund flows are positively related to CDS spreads. Furthermore, it indicates that retail fund flows provide insightful information and serve as the primary driver behind the relation between fund flows and CDS spreads.

The findings of this paper indicate that flows into equity and money market funds could serve as a risk sentiment in credit markets. And this is the first study, to the best of the author’s knowledge, to establish such a linkage between fund flows and CDS spreads to help investors gauge credit market sentiment.

This study aims to examine style-deviation practices in the socially responsible mutual funds (SMRF) industry i.e. how mutual funds game their stated financial objectives to earn a higher relative performance ranking. In addition, the consequences of such practices on sustainable scores and money flows are studied.

A sample of 454 US equity SRMFs is studied. This paper uses panel regressions controlling for time and style fixed-effects.

This study finds that 17.60% of SRMF managers in the sample are engaged in style deviation practices. These practices positively impact the sustainable performance of SRMFs and negatively impact their financial performance. One effect offsets the other and they consequently do not affect money flows. Another finding is that only investors with lower portfolio sustainability scores do show return-chaser behaviour.

This paper reveals that SRMF managers deviating from their stated financial style face a dilemma that is non-existent for their conventional peers that is style deviation practices affect financial and sustainable performance in opposing ways, whereas SRMF investor utility depends positively on both dimensions. The findings are not conclusive about the effectiveness of style deviation practices in attracting SRMF money flows.

SRMF industry has experienced tremendous growth in the past decade. The increased competition in this industry has led managers to strive to attract investors, sometimes by relying on irregular practices that enhance their portfolio results. Regulators should consider how to avoid such perverse behaviour with a view to improving mutual funds transparency.

This is the first research that analyses style deviation practices and their consequences for the SRMF industry.

This paper aims to investigate private pension fund investor sentiment against fund performance and cost in an environment of frequent regulatory changes. The analyses are conducted in a low return, high-cost private pension fund market environment, which makes it easier to observe the relationship between investor sentiment to return and cost.

This paper conducts fixed effect, random effect and random effect within between effect panel data analyses of all Turkish private pension funds from 2011 to 2019. This paper conducts the analyses using aggregate data and subsets based on fund characteristics and pre-post regulation periods.

When regulations provide compensation and improve market efficiency in a pension fund market, investor focus shifted from performance to cost. Investors allocated assets with respect to return realization when adequately compensated for risk or had favorable cost contract clauses. Consequently, investors in pension funds with lower expected returns and no special fee reduction clauses tended to adopt the strategy of cost minimization.

The overlap of regulatory change periods could complicate the ability to distinguish the impact of any one specific change. The findings therefore cannot be generalized to differently structured markets.

Regulatory changes could lead to a switch of investor objectives. When regulatory changes compensate investors and increase market efficiency, investors objective could switch from performance to cost.

This study investigates investor sentiment in a relatively young private pension fund market, in which the relevant regulatory body ambitiously implements frequent changes in regulation. The selected market is unique in the sense that it has negative real returns and high costs, which make investor focus to return and cost more readily apparent.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate if there is any impact of reporting delays on profitability of front-running strategies against the mutual funds.

The author studies if freshness of mutual fund holding information from public disclosures affects precision of flow-based front-running strategies against the funds and if the allowed 60-day reporting delay is able to protect the funds from these front-running activities against them.

Assuming no reporting delay, the author finds that returns from hypothetical front-running strategies are significant, when these are based on the most recent holding information and are not significant, when based on relatively old holding information. Interestingly, these front-running returns appear to be mostly driven by anticipated forced buys by the mutual funds (rather than anticipated forced sales). The return from a front-running strategy long on anticipated forced buys is higher when it is based on relatively illiquid assets. The author also finds that return from a front-running strategy short on anticipated forced sales is significant, when it is based on illiquid assets from relatively old holding information.

Hence, it appears that the allowed 60-day reporting delay is able to protect most of the funds from front-running activities against them, except for the funds holding illiquid assets from anticipated forced sales motivated front-running activities against them.

The paper addresses an interesting question, which has not been studied before – if freshness of fund holding information helps the front-running strategies against the funds and if the allowed reporting delay is effective in protecting the funds from these activities.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the implications of managerial herding for investors’ wealth and capital allocation across funds, and the critical role played by fund governance in monitoring herding incentives.

The author adopt the fund herding measure first proposed by Grinblatt et al. (1995) over the long sample period 1992-2007. Univariate and multivariate tests are then constructed to examine the relationship between managerial herding, performance, and investors’ sensitivities. OLS, fixed-effect panel data models are utilized to conduct the tests.

The author show that managers that do not herd have above-average managerial skills, trade less on noise, and significantly outperform herding managers. The author also illustrate that although fund herding could be used as a signal of managerial quality, underperforming herding funds manage to survive in equilibrium, indicating that investor flows do not adequately respond to the information content of a persistent herding behavior. Finally, the author demonstrate that better governance in the form of stronger managerial incentive schemes constitutes a significant deterrent against detrimental herding strategies, representing an effective monitoring device of the response of fund managers to poor flow-performance sensitivity.

The paper provides original evidence on the efficacy of external and internal governance in deterring wealth-reducing herding strategies. The author document that where more effective managerial incentives schemes are put in place by the management companies, fund managers are more likely to be better informed, resulting in fewer incentives to mimic the trading decisions of their peers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether mutual fund investors can make effective cash flow timing decisions and examine the sensitivity of these decisions to past fund performance using cash flow data at the individual fund level.

This study examines performance persistence and investor timing ability of 200 domestic equity mutual funds in Taiwan between 1996 and 2009. In particular, a performance gap measuring the difference between dollar‐weighted average monthly returns and geometric average monthly returns is used to evaluate investors' timing ability.

The empirical results show that funds that have performed well (poorly) in the previous year tend to continue performing well (poorly) in the following year, and investors' timing performance is negatively related to fund performance. The results also show that investors' timing performance is significantly and negatively related to fund size, length of fund history, and momentum‐style of funds, but positively related to value‐style funds. These results suggest that mutual fund investors are loss‐averse and demonstrate return‐chasing behavior in well‐performing funds.

The paper contributes to the mutual fund performance literature by proposing an integrated framework that jointly tests fund performance and how it affects investors' cash flow timing decisions. Furthermore, the paper individually measures investors' timing sensitivity for the current best (worst) performance funds and consecutive two‐year best (worst) performance funds, and contributes to a growing body of research on the behavior of mutual fund investors.

This study estimates the impact of changes in the mutual fund distributor incentive structure on distributor-advised mutual fund flows. The authors employ two recent major policy interventions by the Indian self-regulatory authority and the financial market regulator – one partial ban and another complete ban on upfront commissions – paid to mutual fund distributors on distributor-advised mutual fund flows.

The authors use novel distributor-level data across the 198 largest distributors in India between 2013 and 2020 and a series of pooled panel random-effect generalized least squares models with robust standard errors to explore the effect of changes of distributor commissions on distributor assets-under-management (AUM), gross sales, commissions and changes (%) in the number of investors in alternate investment avenues like portfolio management services (PMS).

Changes in the incentive structure have a significant negative effect on mutual fund flows at an aggregate level and within MF distributor categories. A significant diversion of investor funds toward PMS is noted, which paid higher upfront commissions to distributors during the same period.

The authors posit that these two developments are not mutually independent and that both fall out of the aforementioned policy changes by Securities and Exchange Board of India and Association of Mutual Funds in India. The study findings have implications for all stakeholders in the Indian mutual fund industry and, by extension, for Indian and global alternative investment avenues.

This study is the first to explore the effects of these two major policy interventions by regulators on mutual fund flows in India.