INVESTORS' PERCEPTION TOWARDS MUTUAL FUND STUDY WITH REFERENCE TO EAST GODAVARI ANDHRA PRADESH

The mutual fund industry in India has registered significant growth since the liberalization of Indian Economy in 1991 and has emerged as a significant financial intermediary.The growing importance of Indian mutual funds may be noted in terms of the increased mobilization of funds and the increasing number of schemes and investors in the industry.The results show that there is a significant association between educational qualification of the investors and the risk tolerance level and occupation of the investors and the risk tolerance level.The results further indicate that there is no significant association between occupation of the investors and the level of knowledge of mutual fund and monthly savings of the investors and the level of knowledge of mutual fund.Therefore, the investors have to consider the prevailing rate of risk free returns and to compare the fund returns with it. Based on this the selection of schemes and the choice of investment avenues can be decided.Due to the fund man timing skill,stock selection ability,imperfect diversification the schemes had suffered with low return. Hence to increase the fund return the concerned fund managers have to improve all these skills.

Distributional Replication

A function which transforms a continuous random variable such that it has a specified distribution is called a replicating function. We suppose that functions may be assigned a price, and study an optimization problem in which the cheapest approximation to a replicating function is sought. Under suitable regularity conditions, including a bound on the entropy of the set of candidate approximations, we show that the optimal approximation comes close to achieving distributional replication, and close to achieving the minimum cost among replicating functions. We discuss the relevance of our results to the financial literature on hedge fund replication; in this case, the optimal approximation corresponds to the cheapest portfolio of market index options which delivers the hedge fund return distribution.

A MIXED BOND AND EQUITY FUND MODEL FOR THE VALUATION OF VARIABLE ANNUITIES

Variable annuity (VA) policies are typically issued on mutual funds invested in both fixed income and equity asset classes. However, due to the lack of specialized models to represent the dynamics of fixed income fund returns, the literature has primarily focused on studying long-term investment guarantees on single-asset equity funds. This article develops a mixed bond and equity fund model in which the fund return is linked to movements of the yield curve. Theoretical motivation for our proposed specification is provided through an analogy with a portfolio of rolling horizon bonds. Moreover, basis risk between the portfolio return and its risk drivers is naturally incorporated into our framework. Numerical results show that the fit of our model to Canadian VA data is adequate. Finally, the valuation of VAs is illustrated and it is found that the prevailing interest rate environment can have a substantial impact on guarantee costs.

Improving managerial decisions in health care sector: application of Promethee II method I n public hospitals

Many hospital rankings are based on algorithms and weights elicited by experts. The paper attempts to build rankings of Polish poviat hospitals using TOPSIS method and to examine the sensitivity of the results to the changes in weights. We considered 11 large and 34 medium-sized hospitals. The criteria set consists of man-days total, profit/loss on sales, contract with the National Health Fund, return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE). Because of this, rankings take into account different spheres in which hospitals perform, including the financial aspect and their main goal, i.e. treating patients. The results show that despite the overall high similarity of rankings, the benchmarking based on rankings should be done with care as the positions of some individual hospitals changed to the great degree.

Stability of hospital rankings

Many hospital rankings are based on algorithms and weights elicited by experts. The paper attempts to build rankings of Polish poviat hospitals using TOPSIS method and to examine the sensitivity of the results to the changes in weights. We considered 11 large and 34 medium-sized hospitals. The criteria set consists of man-days total, profit/loss on sales, contract with the National Health Fund, return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE). Because of this, rankings take into account different spheres in which hospitals perform, including the financial aspect and their main goal, i.e. treating patients. The results show that despite the overall high similarity of rankings, the benchmarking based on rankings should be done with care as the positions of some individual hospitals changed to the great degree.