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This paper deeply investigates the herd behavior of the Egyptian mutual funds under changing and different conditions of the market pre- and post-events and compares the impact of asymmetric risk conditions on the herding behavior of the Egyptian mutual funds in both up and down markets.

We test for the existence of herding for the whole period from 2003 to 2022, as well as for the pre-and post-different Egyptian uprising periods. We employ two well-known models, namely the cross-sectional standard deviation (CSSD) and cross-sectional absolute deviation (CSAD) models. Additionally, we use the quantile regression approach.

We find that the behavior of mutual funds does not change following the different political and social events. For the whole period, we find evidence of herding behavior using only the model of CSAD in down-market conditions. We generalize our finding to be evidence of the existence herding behavior in different quantiles, under only the down market in specific points’ pre, post or both given events throughout the whole series. Conversely, during the upper market, we show a full absence of herding behavior considering all different quantiles. When the market is down, managers are afraid of the condition of uncertainty, neglecting their own private information, avoid acting independently and consequently, following other mutual funds. When the market is up, managers become rational and act fully independent.

Future research should delve deeper into the drivers of herding behavior, assess its longer-term effects, develop risk management strategies and consider regulatory measures to mitigate the potential negative impact on mutual fund performance and investor outcomes.

The study reveals that the behavior of mutual funds remains consistent despite various political and social events, suggesting a degree of resilience in their investment strategies. The research uncovers evidence of herding behavior in both high and low quantiles, but exclusively in down markets. In such conditions of market decline, fund managers appear to forsake their private information, exhibiting a tendency to follow the crowd rather than acting independently.

The study reveals that the behavior of mutual funds remains consistent despite various political and social events, suggesting a degree of resilience in their investment strategies. The research uncovers evidence of herding behavior in both high and low quantiles, but exclusively in down markets. In such conditions of market decline, fund managers appear to forsake their private information, exhibiting a tendency to follow the crowd rather than acting independently. Future research should delve deeper into the drivers of herding behavior, assess its longer-term effects, develop risk management strategies and consider regulatory measures to mitigate the potential negative impact on mutual fund performance and investor outcomes.

The paper investigates the herd behavior of the Egyptian mutual funds under asymmetric risk conditions, the study follows the spectrum of the herding behavior analysis and Egyptian mutual funds, extending the research with imperial analysis of market conditions pre- and post-events including currency floating, COVID-19 and political elections. The study gives substantial recommendations for policymakers and investors in emerging markets mutual funds.

The study assess the selection ability and market timing skills of mutual fund and unit trust managers in Ghana.

The study uses an improved survivorship bias-free dataset of yearly after-fee returns of all mutual funds and unit trusts operating in Ghana from January 2011 to December 2019, cumulating in nine years of quantitative fund data. The authors assess Mutual funds and Unit trusts that ever existed, “alive” or “dead,” over the sample period in the study. The authors construct factor loadings to enable the application of multifactor models in the analysis. The authors apply the unconditional versions of the Jensen alpha, Fama-French three-factor, and Carhart four-factor models to determine the selection ability and market timing skills of 32 mutual funds and 17 unit trusts. The authors deploy HAC-consistent robust standard errors to the OLS estimations to subdue the effect of heterogeneity and autocorrelation.

The results indicate that, on average, mutual funds and unit trust managers possess market timing skills but no selection ability. When the results are decomposed into fund types, fixed-income and balanced mutual fund managers possess selection ability and market timing skills.

To the authors' best knowledge, this study is the earliest to examine the selection ability and market timing skills of both mutual fund and unit trust managers in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It is also the earliest to construct factor loadings for the Ghana stock market.

This study examines current dynamics, consolidates current knowledge, elicits trends, identifies and analyzes primary research clusters, and offers future research directions for mutual fund marketing.

Using bibliographic information from the SCOPUS database, this study used sequential bibliometric (143 documents) and content analyses (37 documents). Bibliometric analysis aids descriptive analysis and science mapping, while content analysis facilitates identifying and analyzing research clusters and provides future research directions.

The study identifies publication trends, the most relevant authors, and journal articles and unveils the knowledge structures of the field. Analysis of bibliographic coupling reveals the following significant clusters: (1) socially responsible investing and investor preferences, (2) investor factors and traits and investment decisions; (3) external factors, mutual funds' performance and proxy information; (4) the role of disclosures and ratings in shaping investment choices, and (5) cognitive biases, information processing errors and investor behavior. Finally, it offers future research directions.

Using different databases, bibliometric analysis tools, study periods or article screening criteria for the study might yield different results. However, this study's significant findings are robust to such alternatives.

This study summarizes primary clusters and identifies gaps in the current literature, which helps scholars, practitioners, regulators and policymakers understand the nuances of mutual funds marketing. Future studies may focus on the role of online and offline integration, using neuroscience for data m and contemporary investment behavior models.

This is the first study to apply a two-stage sequential hybrid review of articles published over the last decade in high-quality journals, enabling an analysis of the depth and breadth of mutual funds marketing research.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the performance of mutual funds during the COVID-19 pandemic with environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria. The main research question is whether mutual fund performance differs with respect to the level of the mutual fund’s ESG score.

The data set contains global fund data, and mutual fund performance is analyzed using two types of data envelopment analysis (DEA) models: the DEA portfolio index (DPEI) and the range direction measure (RDM) DEA. Propensity score matching and logistic regression are also applied.

The results reveal that: nonequity mutual funds present significantly higher performance compared to the performance of equity mutual funds; mutual funds with high ESG scores are associated with significantly higher performance compared to those with low to medium ESG scores; funds with high ESG scores experience higher performance irrespective of their type; and efficiency scores derived from the RDM DEA are significantly higher than those derived from the DPEI model.

Investors, fund managers and market participants can benefit from the findings of this study and improve their investment decision-making process, including more sustainable funds in their portfolios. Regulators and policymakers should further promote or even require the inclusion of more sustainable investments in the financial products offered by institutional investors. The main limitation of the study is related to data availability regarding the ESG score of mutual funds.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that provides robust evidence in support of a positive association between ESG scores and mutual fund performance during the pandemic-induced crisis applying a DEA methodology.

This study aims to test mutual fund superiority, comparing the performance of 646 Islamic mutual funds with 475 ethical funds and conventional proxies.

This study uses statistical methods including paired t-statistics of independent samples, one-way Bonferroni test–analysis of variance–F-statistic for testing means equality, the chi-squared test for median equality and regression models corrected for heteroscedasticity. These methods are used to identify superiority of mutual funds and to validate the significance of the results.

The findings confirm the superiority of conventional funds over ethical funds and ethical funds over Islamic funds. Both ethical and Islamic funds, however, outperform conventional proxies during some recessionary periods. Moreover, stronger performance is recorded for Islamic funds in Europe and North America regions and across age and asset allocation categories, but limited support for reversal fund size, composition focus and reversed price effect.

These findings should assist investors when deciding to invest and motivate Islamic and ethical funds to improve their portfolio formation and asset allocation strategies set by their professional managers.

The originality of this study is in its comprehensive approach in that it compares the performance of funds after accounting for such characteristics as fund objectives, size, age, asset allocation, geographical investment focus, fund composition focus, share price levels and the effect of global crises. This study approach is not only original and productive in documenting Islamic funds’ performance for the past three decades (1990–2022) but can also update the literature on these characteristics collectively and individually.

This paper investigates the performance of locally focused equity mutual funds (LFEFs) in Saudi Arabia as compared with the performance of benchmark funds. More specifically, the focal question pertains to whether Shariah-compliant mutual funds (SMFs) and conventional mutual funds (CMFs) outperform their respective benchmarks. Undertaken in the context of Saudi Arabia's economic planning under Vision 2030, the study offers a foundation for determining whether and the extent to which Shariah-compliant investment strategies are competitive—a matter of considerable importance across 57 Muslim countries.

The Carhart four-factor model is applied to a sample of 39 Saudi Arabian mutual funds (MFs) using the monthly net asset value (NAV) per share. The sample period, April 2007 to October 2016, is considered in its entirety and as three sub-periods, i.e. low-, medium- and high-volatility.

The results show that the locally focused equity mutual funds (LFEFs) significantly outperformed their benchmark, i.e. the Tadawul All Share Index (TASI), during the full sample period and the low-volatility period. According to the empirical comparison, the CMFs also outperformed their TASI benchmark for the full sample period and the low-volatility period. However, the SMFs neither outperformed nor underperformed their S&P Saudi Arabia Domestic Shariah Index benchmark. That is, for each of the SMFs included in the sample, the Jensen's alpha was insignificant for both the full sample and all three volatility sub-periods.

In this paper, the four-factor model is used in the context of a single country. The results, therefore, may not be generalizable to the multi-country level in the Gulf Council Cooperation (GCC) region given differences between the member countries in terms of financial structure and economic focus.

The results reported constitute a useful guide for policymakers and faith-based-sensitive investors concerned about the Shariah compliancy of their portfolios given that there is very little difference between how CMFs and SMFs performed in the focal period. This research can be extended to include other Islamic countries in the GCC region as a basis for identifying optimal investment vehicles, i.e. those most likely to produce high returns at low risk.

The work reported in this paper is original and constitutes a valuable asset for ethnoreligious-sensitive investors. The research has not been published in any capacity and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere.

This study aims to examine the role of fund family size on the money flow of Saudi Arabian open-end equity mutual funds. The author also investigates whether the relationship between fund flow and past return varies based on the fund's family size.

The study analyses 256 equity funds that operated in Saudi Arabia from 2006 until 2017. Pooled and fixed-effect regression models are used to test the relationship between mutual fund flow and family size.

The results indicate that fund flow is higher for large size family funds. The results also show that the relationship between mutual fund flow and past performance is more pronounced for large size families, which supports the concept that investors pay extra attention to funds' return and size.

The author provides evidence of the significant effect of family size of mutual funds on future money flow, which helps fund managers to understand investors' motivations for allocating their cash.

This paper contributes to the literature by examining the impact of family size level on the interaction between fund flow and past performance. This study is believed to be the first to investigate the family size factor in Saudi Arabia using a comprehensive data set.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the organizational form of an investment management firm affects the performance of the mutual funds under its operation. More explicitly, this study aims to test whether funds managed by publicly listed firms achieve different risk-adjusted performance when compared with funds operated by privately held investment firms.

This study uses Jensen's alpha to measure funds’ performance based on the Carhart’s (1997) benchmarks and market timing factors. The researchers test the relation between fund performance and organizational form using regressions. It alleviates the reverse causality and endogeneity using propensity score matching (PSM) methodology. The study investigates the difference in performance of funds managed by public firms on the post- vs pre- initial public offering (IPO) basis. Alternatively, this study tests the performance change post-public listing of the parent firm. It computes the difference for a matched sample of funds managed by private firms that were likely to go public but did not. The researchers match funds using PSM methodology.

This paper provides robust evidence that publicly traded management companies administer relatively under-performing mutual funds in comparison to those managed by privately held firms. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that confirms that organizational decision is endogenous to performance. The study finds that after a privately held company goes public, the performance of their mutual funds and the performance of the matched group funds, whose companies remained private at the same time, tends to decline, compared with companies prior to the public offering. However, the decline in mutual fund performance is larger for the companies who chose to pursue their IPO.

The contribution of this study to the literature is twofold. First, while there is a wealth of literature on the impact of ownership structures on corporate performance, there are very few studies focused on mutual fund markets, despite the evidence that supports a generally mixed effect. This study confirms that the performance of mutual funds managed by publicly traded investments firms is lower than that of funds managed by privately held firms. Second, the organizational decision (private vs public) is not exogenous but depends on the actual funds’ performance.

The objective of this paper is to explore how anchoring affects the dynamics of investor decision-making with regard to mutual funds and how this bias differs amongst gender and level of financial knowledge.

An experimental research design was adopted to uncover the relationship between the variables under study; this involved the use of a questionnaire with an embedded experiment. Data obtained from the study were analysed using Pearson's chi-square test and two-way analysis of variance.

The findings show that, overall, investors were prone to be significantly influenced by the anchoring bias. The study finds a strong, albeit not significant, association between participants' susceptibility to anchor and both gender and the level of financial knowledge of participants. Females were observed to be more likely to anchor than their male counterparts. Also, a higher level of financial knowledge did not help to reduce the possibility of anchoring; it rather increased it.

The findings of the study cannot be interpreted as suggesting causality as the study only tests for association between variables and not causality. Additionally, external validity cannot be fully established as a result of the quasi-experiment approach used.

The study adds to the body of knowledge on the influences of behavioural biases in the sub-region to make investors aware of their biases in order to minimise the influence of these biases on their investment decisions.

This study differs from earlier studies in that it analyses the presence of anchoring as influenced by a completely different set of variables (expertise and gender) and also does it within the context of an African country where there remains a paucity of research on behavioural finance.

This study aims to explore the effect of human resource (HR) strategy (e.g. empowerment and teamwork) on green supply chain integration (e.g. green supplier and customer integration), which further leads to economic performance. Moreover, the authors examined the moderating effects of information systems and mutual trust on the relationship between HR strategy and green supply chain integration.

Using the empirical data from 213 Chinese manufacturing firms, this study uses structural equation modeling and hierarchical regressions to examine the conceptual model.

The study’s findings reveal that empowerment and teamwork positively enhance green supplier and customer integration. Green supplier and customer integration are positively related to economic performance. Moreover, information systems positively moderate the relationship between empowerment and green supplier integration but negatively moderate the relationship between teamwork and green supplier/customer integration. Mutual trust positively moderates the relationship between empowerment and green supplier integration and the relationship between teamwork and green customer integration.

This study extends the existing understanding regarding how to enhance green supply chain integration by adopting an appropriate HR strategy in the context of different levels of information systems and mutual trust.