Why Does Mutual Fund Performance Not Persist? The Impact and Interaction of Fund Flows and Manager Changes

This paper investigates the reasons for the lack of long-term persistence in the investment performance of actively managed equity mutual funds. We document that the responses of investors, fund managers, and investment management companies to past performance have an important impact on future performance. Conditioning on fund flows and manager changes allows us to predict future performance of both past outperforming (winner) and past underperforming (loser) funds. Recent winner funds, experiencing neither high inflows nor the departure of a skilled fund manager, outperform by 3.60 percentage points based on risk-adjusted returns in the following year, relative to winner funds suffering from both effects. We also find that the performance of the worst performing funds experiencing both the replacement of the fund manager (internal governance) and high outflows (external governance) enjoy a subsequent increase in performance of 2.40 percentage points in the following year, relative to loser funds not experiencing these effects. Among loser funds, in particular, both mechanisms appear to interact strongly.

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