Optimum Centralized Portfolio Construction with Decentralized Portfolio Management

Many financial institutions employ outside portfolio managers to manage part or all of their investable assets. These institutions include pension funds, private endowments (e.g., colleges and charities), and private trusts. Pension funds are the largest and most likely organizations to employ several outside managers, each of whom manages a part of the overall portfolio. In this paper we will use the pension fund manager as the prototype of the centralized decision-maker trying to optimally manage a set of decentralized decision-makers but the analysts is general. If the centralized decision-maker (CDM) is a mean variance maximizer, the CDM could construct a portfolio using standard portfolio theory and estimates of mean return, variances, and covariances between the portfolios constructed by a group of decentralized managers. However, this overall portfolio is unlikely to be optimum since the individually managed portfolios themselves were constructed without taking into account the portfolios of the other managers. The purpose of this article is to set up a structure that leads to the optimum portfolio from the viewpoint of the CDM when there are multiple managers and their portfolios are constructed without reference to each other

OPTIMUM CENTRALIZED PORTFOLIO CONSTRUCTION WITH DECENTRALIZED PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT

Many financial institutions employ outside portfolio managers to manage part or all of their investable assets. These institutions include pension funds, private endowments (e.g., colleges and charities), and private trusts. Pension funds are the largest and most likely organizations to employ several outside managers, each of whom manages a part of the overall portfolio. In this paper we will use the pension fund manager as the prototype of the centralized decision-maker trying to optimally manage a set of decentralized decision-makers but the analysts is general. If the centralized decision-maker (CDM) is a mean variance maximizer, the CDM could construct a portfolio using standard portfolio theory and estimates of mean return, variances, and covariances between the portfolios constructed by a group of decentralized managers. However, this overall portfolio is unlikely to be optimum since the individually managed portfolios themselves were constructed without taking into account the portfolios of the other managers. The purpose of this article is to set up a structure that leads to the optimum portfolio from the viewpoint of the CDM when there are multiple managers and their portfolios are constructed without reference to each other

The Adequacy of Investment Choices Offered By 401K Plans

Defined-contribution plans represent a major organizational form for investors’ retirement savings. Today more than one third of all workers are enrolled in 401K plans. In a 401K plan, participants select assets from a set of choices designated by an employer. For over half of 401K-plan participants, retirement savings represent their sole financial asset. Yet to date there has been no study of the adequacy of the choices offered by 401K plans. This paper analyzes the adequacy and characteristics of the choices offered to 401K-plan participants for over 400 plans. We find that, for 62% of the plans, the types of choices offered are inadequate, and that over a 20-year period this makes a difference in terminal wealth of over 300%. We find that funds included in the plans are riskier than the general population of funds in the same categories. We study the characteristics of plans that are associated with adequate investment choices, including an analysis of the use of company stock, plan size, and the use of outside consultants. When we examine one category of investment choices, S&P 500 index funds, we find that the index funds chosen by 401K-plan administrators are on average inferior to the S&P 500 index funds selected by the aggregate of all investors

IMPROVED ESTIMATES OF CORRELATION AND THEIR IMPACT ON THE OPTIMUM PORTFOLIOS

To implement mean variance analysis one needs a technique for forecasting correlation coefficients. In this article we investigate the ability of several techniques to forecast correlation coefficients between securities. We find that separately forecasting the average level of pairwise correlations and individual pair-wise differences from the average improves forecasting accuracy. Furthermore, forming homogenous groups of firms on the basis of industry membership or firm attributes (eg. Size) improves forecast accuracy. Accuracy is evaluated in two ways: First, in terms of the error in estimating future correlation coefficients. Second, in the characteristics of portfolios formed on the basis of each forecasting technique. The ranking of forecasting techniques is robust across both methods of evaluation and the better techniques outperform prior suggestions in the literature of financial economics

The Impact of Mutual Fund Family Membership on Investor Risk

Many investors confine their mutual fund holdings to a single fund family, either for simplicity or through restrictions placed by their retirement savings plan. We find evidence that mutual fund returns are more closely correlated within fund families, which reduces the benefits of investor diversification. The increased correlation is due primarily to common stock holdings, but is also more generally related to families having similar exposures to economic sectors or industries. Fund families also show a propensity to focus on high risk or low risk strategies, which leads to a greater dispersion of risk across restricted investors

Marginal Stockholder Tax Effects and Ex-Dividend Day Behavior-Thirty-Two Years Later

In 1970 Elton and Gruber (hereafter E&G) started an industry by studying the impact of taxes on investor decisions using the behavior of share prices around the ex-dividend date. E&G showed that if taxes enter investors’ decisions, then the fall in price on the ex-dividend day should reflect the post-tax value of the dividend relative to the post-tax value of capital gains on that day. Because dividends in most time periods are taxed more heavily than capital gains, the theory suggests that if taxes affect investor’s choices, the fall in stock price should in general be less than the dividend

THE IMPACT OF MUTUAL FUND FAMILY MEMBERSHIP ON INVESTOR RISK

Many investors confine their mutual fund holdings to a single fund family, either for simplicity or through restrictions placed by their retirement savings plan. We find evidence that mutual fund returns are more closely correlated within than between fund families. As a result, restricting investment to one fund family leads to a greater total portfolio risk than diversifying across fund families. The increased correlation is due primarily to common stock holdings, but is also more generally related to families having similar exposures to economic sectors or industries. Fund families also show a propensity to focus on high risk or low risk strategies, which leads to a greater dispersion of risk across restricted investors. An investor considering adding an additional fund either inside or outside the family would need to believe the inside fund offered an additional 50 to 70 basis points in return to achieve the same Sharpe ratio

Participant Reaction and The Performance of Funds Offered by 401(k) Plans

This is the first study to examine both how well plan administrators select funds and how participants react to plan administrator decisions. We find that on average administrators select funds that outperform randomly selected funds of the same type. When administrators change offerings, they choose funds that did well in the past, but after the change deleted funds do better than added funds. Plan participants react strongly to past performance in their allocation decisions. This accentuates the changes in allocation caused by returns. Participant allocations do no better than naïve allocation rules such as equal investment in each offering

Factors Affecting the Valuation of Corporate Bonds

The valuation of corporate debt is an important issue in asset pricing. While there has been an enormous amount of theoretical modeling of corporate bond prices, there has been relatively little empirical testing of these models. Recently there has been extensive development of rating based reduced form models. These models take as a premise that bonds when grouped by ratings are homogeneous with respect to risk. For each risk group the models require estimates of several characteristics such as the spot yield curve, the default probabilities and the recovery rate. These estimates are then used to compute the theoretical price for each bond in the group. The purpose of this article is to examine the pricing of corporate bonds when bonds are grouped by ratings, and to investigate the ability of characteristics, in addition to bond ratings, to improve the performance of rating based models. Most of our testing will be conducted in models which are in the spirit of the theory developed by Duffie and Singleton (1997) and Duffie (1999)