Fee Waivers in Money Market Mutual Funds

It is a widespread practice among mutual fund managers to voluntarily waive fees they have a contractual right to claim. The effective fee charged may be substantially less than indicated in expense ratios and may vary over the year despite a constant contractual fee. Retail fund managers use fee waivers to strategically adjust net advisory fees to current realizations in performance and expected fund flows. The paper finds differences in waiving between retail and institutional funds because of differences in the effectiveness of waivers in advancing performance.

Demand Curves and the Pricing of Money Management

Recent studies (e.g. Gruber (1996)) conclude that a subset of investors allocates away from funds with relatively worse prospects, and toward funds with better prospects. The implication for a given fund is that good prospects increase the density of performance-sensitive investors, and bad prospects increase the density of performance-insensitive investors. Since fees come out of performance, this has a straightforward pricing implication: investors remaining in the funds with bad prospects should be charged more, whether by the same fund or by a different fund that absorbs the investors. This dynamic is apparent from several angles in a sample of retail money-funds.

The demographics of fund turnover

This article documents various demographic factors which influence mutual fund turnover including managerial experience, location, education, and gender. On average, funds in financial centers trade more but this excess turnover declines with experience. While most extra trading is concentrated among less experienced managers in financial centers, they do not outperform inexperienced managers located in smaller towns. Furthermore, managers in financial centers increase trading after good performance. This result is particularly strong for inexperienced, more educated male fund managers investing in growth stocks and located in New York. Our results provide strong evidence that demographic factors influence fund manager trading behavior.Labor market; Mutual funds; Overconfident trading; Performance evaluation

Technical Change And Growth In The Textile Industry: The Nonwoven Sector

We examine the performance of a growing sector of the textile industry: nonwoven fabric mills.  This sector is emerging from what was once a marginal manufacturing sector to become increasingly a focus for the future of textiles in the US.  From disposable diapers to bleach wipes, medical apparel to house wrapping, new products are entering the market; these products are made possible by technological advancements in adhesion techniques, fiber modifications and delivery advancements. In order to better understand these significant industry dynamics, we estimate a translog cost function to calculate the elasticity of substitution between capital, labor, energy and materials and to see how these change over time. Additionally, we track trends in the elasticity of scale and the impact of technological change. Textile manufacturing in the United States is shifting away from commodity products and the innovative nonwovens sector provides a much needed exemplar for future textile manufacturing

The Interdependence between Mutual Fund Managers and Investors in Setting Fees

In the mutual fund industry, there is a unique endogeneity between managers and investors. If a manager wants to lower fees in the hopes of attracting investors, the investors will not react unless they believe the manager will maintain low fees for a period of time. A binding contract is one way for managers to signal their commitment to low fees. However, in practice, many mutual funds waive fees with no contractual agreement that they will continue to waive fees. We show in a theoretical framework that an equilibrium with waivers can arise without contracts as long as investors' are relatively inert and discount factors are high enough for manager's to care about future fees. Investors are not fooled by waivers and are fully informed of the manager's actions and ability. If past returns have information about future returns, waivers indirectly act as a performance-based salary.

Environmental Sustainabilitys Impact On Earnings

There is ever increasing social pressure for businesses to adopt sustainable methods of production to minimize environmental impacts. While this may be laudable, businesses have a responsibility to their stakeholders to maximize financial results. These potentially competing objectives are often referred to as part of the triple bottom line. In this paper, we restrict our attention to the original bottom line, Earnings per Share, and the Environmental bottom line of conserving resources. Focusing on the health care sector, we find a clear relationship between EPS and the adoption of sustainable practices. We augment this study with a look at expectations. That is, to what extent are sustainable business practices affecting the financial markets assessment of expected future success v. current financial success? Future expectations could be affected if environmental initiatives signal enlightened leadership or if a business that adopts environmental initiatives is thus well-positioned to face regulatory uncertainty in the future. Either of these management advantages would raise expectations of future success and thus be reflected in higher stock prices today, beyond what is currently captured in earnings ratios

Demand Curves and the Pricing of Money Management

One reason why funds charge different prices to their investors is that they face different demand curves. One source of differentiation is asset retention: Performance-sensitive investors migrate from worse to better prospects, taking their performance sensitivity with them. In the cross-section we show that past attrition significantly influences the current pricing of retail but not institutional funds. In time-series we show that the repricing of retail funds after merging in new shareholders is predicted by the estimated effect on its demand curve. This result is robust to other influences on repricing, including asset and account-size changes

Do Shareholders' Preferences Affect their Funds' Management? Evidence from the Cross Section of Shareholders and Funds

We consider how fund managers respond to the conflicting preferences of their investors. We focus on the conflict between the taxable and retirement accounts of international funds, which face different tradeoffs between dividends and capital gains. In principle, managers could resolve this conflict through dividend arbitrage, but a proprietary database of dividend-arbitrage transactions shows that in practice they cannot. Thus, managers must resolve it through their investment policies, and we find robust evidence that managers with more retirement money favor the preferences of retirement investors. We find additional evidence in the difference between U.S. and Canadian funds' portfolio weights. Nous étudions comment les gestionnaires de fonds réagissent aux préférences contradictoires de leurs investisseurs. Notre étude se concentre principalement sur les conflits entre les comptes taxés et les comptes de retraite des fonds internationaux qui font l'objet de compromis différents entre les gains en dividendes et les gains de capital. En théorie, les gestionnaires peuvent résoudre ces conflits par des opérations d'arbitrage sur les dividendes, mais une base de données privée d'opérations d'arbitrage fait apparaître qu'en pratique ils ne peuvent pas. Les gestionnaires doivent alors résoudre ces conflits à travers leurs politiques d'investissement, et nous trouvons des résultats significatifs montrant que ceux dont le capital est issu majoritairement des retraites favorisent les investisseurs de fonds de pension. Nous trouvons également des différences entre les poids des portefeuilles de fonds américains et canadiens.Dividend arbitrage, tax efficiency, agency issues, mutual funds, arbitrage sur les dividendes, taxes sur les rendements, placements pour compte, fonds commun de placement

How and Why do Investors Trade Votes, and What Does it Mean?

The standard analysis of corporate governance is that shareholders vote in the ratios that firms choose, such as one-share-one-vote. But if the cost of unbundling and trading votes is sufficiently low, then shareholders vote in the ratios that they themselves choose. We document an active market for votes within the equity-loan market, where we find that the average vote sells for zero. We hypothesize that asymmetric information motivates these vote reallocations, and we find support for this view in the cross section of votes: there is more trade for higher-spread firms and more for poor performers, especially when the vote is close. We also find that the vote reallocations correspond to support for shareholder proposals and opposition to management proposals. L'analyse classique de la gouvernance d'entreprise suppose que les actionnaires votent selon les modalités choisies par la firme, par exemple un vote par action. Mais si les coûts associés à la séparation et à l'échange des votes sont suffisamment faibles, alors les actionnaires votent selon les modalités qu'ils ont eux-mêmes choisies. Nous présentons le cas d'un marché actif de votes au sein du marché des mises de fonds sous forme d'emprunts (equity loans), où nous constatons qu'en moyenne les votes se vendent pour rien. Nous supposons que l'asymétrie d'information provoque cette réallocation des votes, et nous étayons cette hypothèse à travers l'étude transversale des votes : le nombre d'opérations est plus important pour les compagnies dont l'écart acheteur-vendeur est plus élevé ainsi que pour celles dont les résultats sont plus faibles, particulièrement lorsque le vote est clos. Cette étude montre aussi que la réallocation des votes permet de soutenir les propositions des actionnaires et de s'opposer à celles des gestionnaires.vote trading, corporate governance, equity lending, information asymmetry, transaction de votes, gouvernance d'entreprise, prêt d'actions, asymétrie d'information

Valuable Information and Costly Liquidity: Evidence from Individual Mutual Fund Trades

Until recently, all Canadian mutual funds were required to disclose all their individual trades, offering a unique and ideal opportunity to measure and analyze the cost and performance of mutual funds\u27 trades. We find that active management delivers both cheaper trades and better subsequent performance, and that the dissipative effect of flow-driven transactions costs is primarily through forced sales. Fund size associates with both cheaper trades and better subsequent performance, and a series of trades predicts more price movement in the predicted direction, indicating the value to funds of keeping their trading anonymous