IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jbfina/v36y2012i4p1210-1223.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Closing and cloning in open-end mutual funds

Author

Listed:
  • Chen, Hsiu-Lang
  • Gao, Sheldon
  • Hu, Xiaoqing

Abstract

Using a unique dataset, we document that only those closed funds for which no new fund is subsequently launched continuously deliver positive abnormal returns. This suggests the existence of an optimal fund scale. In spite of the potential diseconomies of scale, a non-trivial proportion of closed funds have new funds cloned—the scale motive would not be a complete explanation for the closure. When managers of closed funds clone new funds, they receive greater public attention and thus can attract more fund flows and charge higher fees. Furthermore, better-performing closed fund managers attract more fund flows to their new siblings, making the closure an effective mechanism to extract economic rents. Overall, we find that closing and cloning is an attractive strategy for funds seeking to increase their management fees and funds with more managers in place. Aspects of the closed fund family also affect the launch decision of new siblings.

Suggested Citation

  • Chen, Hsiu-Lang & Gao, Sheldon & Hu, Xiaoqing, 2012. "Closing and cloning in open-end mutual funds," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 36(4), pages 1210-1223.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jbfina:v:36:y:2012:i:4:p:1210-1223
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jbankfin.2011.11.010
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378426611003219
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jbankfin.2011.11.010?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Tom Nohel & Z. Jay Wang & Lu Zheng, 2010. "Side-by-Side Management of Hedge Funds and Mutual Funds," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 23(6), pages 2342-2373, June.
    2. Chevalier, Judith & Ellison, Glenn, 1997. "Risk Taking by Mutual Funds as a Response to Incentives," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 105(6), pages 1167-1200, December.
    3. Erik R. Sirri & Peter Tufano, 1998. "Costly Search and Mutual Fund Flows," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 53(5), pages 1589-1622, October.
    4. Jonathan B. Berk & Richard C. Green, 2004. "Mutual Fund Flows and Performance in Rational Markets," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 112(6), pages 1269-1295, December.
    5. Scharfstein, David S & Stein, Jeremy C, 1990. "Herd Behavior and Investment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 80(3), pages 465-479, June.
    6. Manakyan, Herman & Liano, Kartono, 1997. "Performance of mutual funds before and after closing to new investors," Financial Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 6(4), pages 257-269.
    7. Thomas Brush & Aneel Karnani, 1996. "Impact of Plant Size and Focus on Productivity: An Empirical Study," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 42(7), pages 1065-1081, July.
    8. Jerold B. Warner & Joanna Shuang Wu, 2011. "Why Do Mutual Fund Advisory Contracts Change? Performance, Growth, and Spillover Effects," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 66(1), pages 271-306, February.
    9. Murray, John D & White, Robert W, 1983. "Economies of Scale and Economies of Scope in Multiproduct Financial Institutions: A Study of British Columbia Credit Unions," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 38(3), pages 887-902, June.
    10. Susan E. K. Christoffersen, 2001. "Why Do Money Fund Managers Voluntarily Waive Their Fees?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(3), pages 1117-1140, June.
    11. Joseph Chen & Harrison Hong & Ming Huang & Jeffrey D. Kubik, 2004. "Does Fund Size Erode Mutual Fund Performance? The Role of Liquidity and Organization," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(5), pages 1276-1302, December.
    12. Philip A. Trostel, 2004. "Returns to scale in producing human capital from schooling," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 56(3), pages 461-484, July.
    13. Smaby, Timothy R. & Fizel, John L., 1995. "Fund closings as a signal to investors: Investment performance of open-end mutual funds that close to new shareholders," Financial Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 4(2), pages 71-80.
    14. Jeremy C. Stein, 2002. "Information Production and Capital Allocation: Decentralized versus Hierarchical Firms," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 57(5), pages 1891-1921, October.
    15. Vikram Nanda, 2004. "Family Values and the Star Phenomenon: Strategies of Mutual Fund Families," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 17(3), pages 667-698.
    16. Arturo Bris & Huseyin Gulen & Padma Kadiyala & P. Raghavendra Rau, 2007. "Good Stewards, Cheap Talkers, or Family Men? The Impact of Mutual Fund Closures on Fund Managers, Flows, Fees, and Performance," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 20(3), pages 953-982.
    17. Fama, Eugene F & MacBeth, James D, 1973. "Risk, Return, and Equilibrium: Empirical Tests," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 81(3), pages 607-636, May-June.
    18. Fama, Eugene F & French, Kenneth R, 1996. "Multifactor Explanations of Asset Pricing Anomalies," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 51(1), pages 55-84, March.
    19. Daniel N. Deli, 2002. "Mutual Fund Advisory Contracts: An Empirical Investigation," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 57(1), pages 109-133, February.
    20. Christensen, Laurits R & Greene, William H, 1976. "Economies of Scale in U.S. Electric Power Generation," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 84(4), pages 655-676, August.
    21. Zhao, Xinge, 2004. "Why are some mutual funds closed to new investors?," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 28(8), pages 1867-1887, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Auer, Benjamin R. & Schuhmacher, Frank & Niemann, Sebastian, 2023. "Cloning mutual fund returns," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 90(C), pages 31-37.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Casavecchia, Lorenzo, 2016. "Fund managers' herding and the sensitivity of fund flows to past performance," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 205-221.
    2. Casavecchia, Lorenzo & Tiwari, Ashish, 2016. "Cross trading by investment advisers: Implications for mutual fund performance," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 25(C), pages 99-130.
    3. Cuthbertson, Keith & Nitzsche, Dirk & O'Sullivan, Niall, 2016. "A review of behavioural and management effects in mutual fund performance," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 162-176.
    4. Arturo Bris & Huseyin Gulen & Padmaja Kadiyala & Raghavendra Rau, 2005. "Good Stewards, Cheap Talkers, or Family Men? The Impact of Mutual Fund Closures on Fund Managers, Flows, Fees, and Performance," Yale School of Management Working Papers amz2658, Yale School of Management, revised 01 Sep 2006.
    5. Cashman, George D., 2010. "Pay-performance sensitivity and firm size: Insights from the mutual fund industry," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 16(4), pages 400-412, September.
    6. Arturo Bris & Huseyin Gulen & Padmaja Kadiyala & Raghavendra Rau, 2005. "Good Stewards, Cheap Talkers, or Family Men? The Impact of Mutual Fund Closures on Fund Managers, Flows, Fees, and Performance," Yale School of Management Working Papers amz2658, Yale School of Management, revised 01 Sep 2006.
    7. Gil-Bazo, Javier & Ruiz-Verdú, Pablo, 2006. "Yet another puzzle? the relation between price and performance in the mutual fund industry," DEE - Working Papers. Business Economics. WB wb066519, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía de la Empresa.
    8. Nanda, Vikram K. & Wang, Z. Jay & Zheng, Lu, 2009. "The ABCs of mutual funds: On the introduction of multiple share classes," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 18(3), pages 329-361, July.
    9. Youchang Wu & Russ Wermers & Josef Zechner, 2016. "Managerial Rents vs. Shareholder Value in Delegated Portfolio Management: The Case of Closed-End Funds," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 29(12), pages 3428-3470.
    10. Clemens Sialm & T. Mandy Tham, 2016. "Spillover Effects in Mutual Fund Companies," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 62(5), pages 1472-1486, May.
    11. Li Xian Liu & Fuming Jiang & Jizhong Li & Omar Al Farooque, 2021. "Antecedents of Equity Fund Performance: A Contingency Perspective," Review of Pacific Basin Financial Markets and Policies (RPBFMP), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 24(01), pages 1-40, March.
    12. Hsiu-lang Chen & Rodrigo F. Malaquias, 2018. "Does Individual Fund Shareholder Structure Matter? A Study of Exclusive Funds in Brazil," Review of Economics & Finance, Better Advances Press, Canada, vol. 12, pages 1-15, May.
    13. Yong Chen & Nan Qin, 2017. "The Behavior of Investor Flows in Corporate Bond Mutual Funds," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 63(5), pages 1365-1384, May.
    14. Teodor Dyakov & Marno Verbeek, 2019. "Can Mutual Fund Investors Distinguish Good from Bad Managers?," International Review of Finance, International Review of Finance Ltd., vol. 19(3), pages 505-540, September.
    15. Agarwal, Vikas & Ma, Linlin & Mullally, Kevin, 2015. "Managerial multitasking in the mutual fund industry," CFR Working Papers 13-10 [rev.], University of Cologne, Centre for Financial Research (CFR).
    16. Chang, Xiaochen & Guo, Songlin & Huang, Junkai, 2022. "Kidnapped mutual funds: Irrational preference of naive investors and fund incentive distortion," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 83(C).
    17. Blake, David & Caulfield, Tristan & Ioannidis, Christos & Tonks, Ian, 2014. "Improved inference in the evaluation of mutual fund performance using panel bootstrap methods," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 183(2), pages 202-210.
    18. Martin Rohleder & Dominik Schulte & Marco Wilkens, 2017. "Management of flow risk in mutual funds," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 48(1), pages 31-56, January.
    19. Kaniel, Ron & Parham, Robert, 2017. "WSJ Category Kings – The impact of media attention on consumer and mutual fund investment decisions," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 123(2), pages 337-356.
    20. Alexander Swade & Gerrit Köchling & Peter N. Posch, 2021. "Managerial behavior in fund tournaments—the impact of TrueSkill," Journal of Asset Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 22(1), pages 62-75, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Mutual funds; Fund closing; Fund cloning;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G02 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Behavioral Finance: Underlying Principles
    • G23 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Non-bank Financial Institutions; Financial Instruments; Institutional Investors

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jbfina:v:36:y:2012:i:4:p:1210-1223. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jbf .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.