Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

We empirically analyze the nature of returns to scale in active mutual fund management. We find strong evidence of decreasing returns at the industry level: As the size of the active mutual fund industry increases, a fund's ability to outperform passive benchmarks declines. At the fund level, all methods considered indicate decreasing returns, but estimates that avoid econometric biases are insignificant. We also find that the active management industry has become more skilled over time. This upward trend in skill coincides with industry growth, which precludes the skill improvement from boosting fund performance. Finally, we find that performance deteriorates over a typical fund's lifetime. This result can also be explained by industry-level decreasing returns to scale.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

A portfolio's liquidity depends not only on the liquidity of its holdings but also on its diversification. We propose simple, theoretically motivated measures of portfolio liquidity and diversification. We also develop an equilibrium model relating portfolio liquidity to fund size, expense ratio, and turnover. As the model predicts, mutual funds with less liquid portfolios have smaller size, higher expense ratios, and lower turnover. The model also yields additional predictions that we verify empirically: larger funds are cheaper, funds that trade less are larger and cheaper, and funds that are too big perform worse. We also find that mutual fund portfolios have become more liquid because both components of diversification, coverage and balance, have trended upward.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

We develop a model in which an entrepreneur learns about the average profitability of a private firm before deciding whether to take the firm public. In this decision, the entrepreneur trades off diversification benefits of going public against benefits of private control. The model predicts that firm profitability should decline after the IPO, on average, and that this decline should be larger for firms with more volatile profitability and firms with less uncertain average profitability. These predictions are supported empirically in a sample of 7,183 IPOs in the U.S. between 1975 and 2004.