Network-Induced Agency Conflicts in Delegated Portfolio Management

ABSTRACT Social ties between mutual funds and the companies in which they invest (investees) can both facilitate information transfers and encourage favoritism. Using the investment choices of mutual funds in China, we compare investment performance of holdings in companies that are socially connected to mutual funds versus those that are not. We find that funds allocate more investment to connected investees' stocks, especially when a fund is weakly monitored. This overweighting is greater in times of poor investee performance, when the benefits of additional investment to the connected investees are high. Weakly monitored funds' preference for connected stocks hurts the returns of these funds, yielding a 6.6 percent lower annualized risk-adjusted return, relative to closely monitored funds. These results suggest that, absent sufficient monitoring, agency conflicts generated by social networks can dominate the information advantages of these networks. JEL Classifications: G10; G11; G14.

Transparency and Talent Allocation in Money Management

We construct and analyze the equilibrium of a model of delegated portfolio management in which money managers signal their investment skills via fund transparency. To lower the costs of transparency, high-skill managers rely on their performance to separate from low-skill managers over time. In contrast, medium-skill managers rely on transparency to separate, especially when it is difficult for investors to tell them apart through performance alone. Low-skill managers mimic high-skill managers in opaque funds, hoping to replicate their performance and compensation. The model yields several novel empirical predictions that contrast transparent and opaque funds. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

How Does Illiquidity Affect Delegated Portfolio Choice?

In response to how they are compensated, mutual fund managers who are underperforming by mid-year are likely to increase the risk of their portfolios toward the year-end. We argue that an increase in the liquidity of the stocks that managers use to shift risk can lead to an increase in the size of their risky bets. This in turn hurts fund investors by increasing the costs of misaligned incentives associated with delegated portfolio management. We provide both theoretical and empirical results that are consistent with this argument. We use decimalization as an exogenous shock to liquidity to identify causal effects.