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Offsetting the Incentives: Risk Shifting and Benefits of Benchmarking in Money Management

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  • Basak, Suleyman
  • Pavlova, Anna
  • Shapiro, Alex

Abstract

Money managers are rewarded for increasing the value of assets under management, and predominantly so in the mutual fund industry. This gives the manager an implicit incentive to exploit the well-documented positive fund-flows to relative-performance relationship by manipulating her risk exposure. In a dynamic asset allocation framework, we show that as the year-end approaches, the ensuing convexities in the manager's objective induce her to closely mimic the index, relative to which her performance is evaluated, when the fund's year-to-date return is sufficiently high. As her relative performance falls behind, she chooses to deviate from the index by either increasing or decreasing the volatility of her portfolio. The maximum deviation is achieved at a critical level of underperformance. It may be optimal for the manager to reach such deviation via selling the risky asset despite its positive risk premium. Under multiple sources of risk, with both systematic and idiosyncratic risks present, we show that optimal managerial risk shifting may not necessarily involve taking on any idiosyncratic risk. The manager's policy results in economically significant departures from investors' desired risk exposure. We then demonstrate how constraining the manager's investment opportunity set, via a simple benchmarking restriction, can ameliorate the adverse effects of managerial incentive

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sloan School of Management in its series Working papers with number 4303-03.

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Date of creation: 23 May 2003
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Handle: RePEc:mit:sloanp:3514

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Postal: MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (MIT), SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT, 50 MEMORIAL DRIVE CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS 02142 USA
Phone: 617-253-2659
Web page: http://mitsloan.mit.edu/
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Postal: MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (MIT), SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT, 50 MEMORIAL DRIVE CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS 02142 USA

Related research

Keywords: Fund Flows; Implicit Incentives; Risk Taking; Benchmarking; Risk Management; Investments;

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References

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Citations

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Cited by:
  1. Jackwerth, Jens Carsten & Hodder, James E., 2006. "Incentive Contracts and Hedge Fund Management," MPRA Paper 11632, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  2. Suleyman Basak & Anna Pavlova & Alexander Shapiro, 2007. "Optimal Asset Allocation and Risk Shifting in Money Management," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 20(5), pages 1583-1621, 2007 21.
  3. Jens Carsten Jackwerth & James E. Hodder, 2003. "Incentive Contracts and Hedge Fund Management: A Numerical Evaluation Procedure," CoFE Discussion Paper 03-10, Center of Finance and Econometrics, University of Konstanz.
  4. Dimitri Vayanos, 2004. "Flight to Quality, Flight to Liquidity, and the Pricing of Risk," NBER Working Papers 10327, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  5. Thomas P. Gehrig & Torben Lütje & Lukas Menkhoff, 2009. "Bonus Payments and Fund Managers' Behavior: Transatlantic Evidence," CESifo Economic Studies, CESifo, vol. 55(3-4), pages 569-594.
  6. Suleyman Basak & Alex Shapiro & Lucie Teplá, 2006. "Risk Management with Benchmarking," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 52(4), pages 542-557, April.
  7. Anna Pavlova & Roberto Rigobon, 2005. "Wealth Transfers, Contagion, and Portfolio Constraints," NBER Working Papers 11440, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  8. Castaneda, Pablo, 2005. "Portfolio Choice and Benchmarking: The Case of the Unemployment Insurance Fund in Chile," MPRA Paper 3346, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 30 Dec 2006.
  9. Jules H. van Binsbergen & Michael W. Brandt & Ralph S.J. Koijen, 2006. "Optimal Decentralized Investment Management," NBER Working Papers 12144, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  10. Lewellen, Katharina, 2004. "Financing Decisions When Managers Are Risk Averse," Working papers 4438-03, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sloan School of Management.
  11. Vikash Ramiah & Imad Moosa & Ben O'Neill & Milica Backulja & Amel Jacoub & Terry Hallahan & John Vaz, 2012. "Tournament behaviour in Malaysian managed funds," International Journal of Managerial Finance, Emerald Group Publishing, vol. 8(4), pages 381-399.
  12. Livio Stracca, 2006. "Delegated Portfolio Management: A Survey Of The Theoretical Literature," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 20(5), pages 823-848, December.

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