Sriram V. Villupuram

Investor Behavior in the Mutual Fund Industry: Evidence from Gross Flows

Using a large sample of monthly gross flows from 1997 to 2003, we uncover several previously undocumented regularities in investor behavior. First, investor purchases and sales produce fund-level gross flows that are highly persistent. Persistence in fund flows dominates performance as a predictor of future fund flows. More importantly, failing to account for flow persistence leads to incorrect inferences with respect to the relation between performance and flows. Second, we document that investors react differently to performance depending on the type of fund, and that investor trading activity produces meaningful differences in the persistence of fund flows across mutual fund types. Third, at least some investors appear to evaluate and respond to mutual fund performance over much shorter time spans than previously assessed. Additionally, we document differences in the speed and magnitude of investors’ purchase and sales responses to performance.

Investors Do Respond to Poor Mutual Fund Performance: Evidence from Inflows and Outflows

We examine the relation between mutual fund performance and gross flows for a large sample of actively managed U.S. mutual funds. Unlike previous studies that have only examined periods of generally increasing net flows, our sample includes periods of both increasing and decreasing net flows. We find that outflows are related to performance, with investors withdrawing money from poor performers. We also find that outflows and inflows respond asymmetrically to performance, outflows increase more aggressively following poor performance, and inflows increase more aggressively following good performance. Additionally, we find a symmetric performance net flow relation.

Preferred Stock: Some Insights into Capital Structure

This study analyzes the reactions of equity holders and bondholders to the announcement of 427 preferred stock issues. We document an average equity announcement effect of −0.65%. This reaction is positively influenced by a number of measures of firm creditworthiness and transparency and is higher for bank issuers. The equity market reaction is negatively influenced by convertibility (and the moneyness of the embedded option) and by the firms accounting treatment of the issue (specifically if the issue is classified as equity). We find that average credit default swap spreads decrease by 50 basis points after the issue announcement. This decrease is also larger for more creditworthy and transparent firms. Convertibility and the moneyness of the embedded option further decrease the CDS spread. In aggregate, the decrease in equity value is much smaller than the increase in the value of the issuers debt.

Persistence in the return and volatility of home price indices

We examine the return and volatility of the Standard & Poors/Case–Shiller (S&P/CS) real estate indices for evidence of long memory in the form of fractional differencing. Examining the long memory properties of these indices is relevant, in part, because effectively hedging real estate price risk through the construction of minimum variance dynamic hedge ratios requires proper modelling of long memory dynamics, and evidence of long memory would imply a violation of weak form efficiency. We find evidence of very persistent long memory in both the return and volatility of real estate indices. For real estate index returns, the evidence of persistent long memory contrasts sharply with other asset classes such as stocks, bonds and commodities. The evidence of long memory in real estate return volatility is in accordance with the volatility dynamics in other asset classes, although the degree of persistence is greater. We also find that some evidence of greater persistence may be due to nonlinearities in the underlying data generating process.

Corporate Bonds, Macroeconomic News, and Investor Flows

This article examines the impact of macroeconomic announcements on corporate bond prices and investor migrations across various types of bonds over time. In addition, the authors compare the responses of investor-grade bonds and speculative corporate bonds. They find corporate bond responses to be different from those of Treasury bonds. Positive macrosurprises are followed by declining (rising) yields on corporate bonds (Treasuries), implying that investors may be migrating between Treasuries and corporate bonds very rapidly. They also identify that the sensitivity of junk bonds is more pronounced than that of investment-grade bonds. Finally, they document that the behavior of corporate bonds is very similar to that of their equity counterparts in that they exhibit greater sensitivity to negative macroshocks than to positive shocks.

Homebuilders, Affiliated Financing Arms, and the Mortgage Crisis

The authors’ findings indicate that homebuilder financing affiliates do make loans to observably riskier borrowers, but the loans made by homebuilders have lower delinquency rates than those made by unaffiliated lenders, even when loan and borrower characteristics are held constant.

Life Insurer Cost of Equity with Asymmetric Risk Factors

This study presents an improved model for estimating life insurer cost of capital with the inclusion of upside and downside risk factors and controlling for life insurer characteristics. Although various asymmetric measures of market risk have been shown to be priced factors for the broader equity market, life insurer realized equity returns include a much larger premium for bearing downside risk, even after controlling for firm characteristics and other measures of risk. Cross-sectional regression analysis finds a positive (negative) premium for downside (upside) betas, conditional on down and up markets, respectively. Coskewness and cokurtosis are also priced factors.