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The paper analyzes the eects of career concerns of portfolio managers on their incentives to trade in a order-driven market. We show that career concerns lead portfolio managers to trade even whithout valuable informa- tion, and hence even when they expect a negative return from trading. We then analyze how managers reacts to changes in asset volatility and …nd that uninformed managers facing career concerns trade larger quantities as asset riskiness increases. As a testable empirical implication, the model predicts that increasing levels of institutional ownership in …nancial markets lead to higher trading volumes that are positively correlated with asset volatility.
American Economic Review, 2012
We propose a model where investors hire fund managers to invest either in risky bonds or in riskless assets. Some managers have superior information on the default probability. Looking at the past performance, investors update beliefs on their managers and make firing decisions. This leads to career concerns which affect investment decisions, generating a positive or negative "reputational premium". For example, when the default probability is high, uninformed managers prefer to invest in riskless assets to reduce the probability of being fired. As the economic and financial conditions change, the reputational premium amplifies the reaction of prices and capital flows.
2010
The traditional view on CEO pay suggests that the use of equity-based incentives (e.g., stocks and options) should increase when stock prices become more informative about managerial action. In this paper, we show this is only true in the relative sense, when comparing with CEOs' non-equity-based incentives (e.g., bonus). We confirm our model's prediction to show that the use of equity-based incentives actually falls when institutional traders impound more information in stock prices. In other words, these two mechanisms are substitutes. These predictions are crystallized by our empirical results, focusing on S&P 1,500 firms from 1992-2007. Despite the lower use of equity-based incentives and the even lower still use of bonus incentives, the CEO works harder and her total compensation increases, as suggested by our model. Our paper not only helps clarify the theoretical agency relation between CEO incentives and price efficiency due to informed trading, but also utilizes a new way to infer price informativeness from the number of institutional informed traders as well as the magnitude of their trades from a -swing‖ measure of informed trading. In its first application to the United States, we show that the swing measure can be inferred from SEC 13f filings and is robust to a number of tests.
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2012
The paper proposes a model of delegated portfolio management in which career concerns lead to unprofitable trade by uninformed managers (i.e. churning). We find that churning does not necessarily reduce the return that a representative investor expects ex-ante from delegating trade to a manager. As uninformed managers churn, the level of noise in the market increases and informed managers generate higher returns than in the absence of churning. When fundamental volatility is relatively low, uninformed managers trade less aggressively and the high returns expected from informed managers more than compensate the losses expected from uninformed managers. While career concerns generally lead to an increase in trade volume, the pattern of churning that we highlight also implies that both the volume of uninformed trade and the aggregate volume of trade are positively related to the level of asset riskiness.
2009
This brief paper constructs a model of delegated portfolio management in which two agency relationships are characterized. First, a delegation process from investors to fund companies, and second, a delegation from fund companies to fund managers. Career concerns of both agents lead to a churning equilibrium in which uninformed managers trade noisily, and uninformed fund companies are willing to hire these uninformed managers. This equilibrium delivers non-fully informative prices and a positive and high trading volume. Our model then strengths previous explanations to the trade puzzle, predicting an increasing trade activity as long as institutional investors with intense delegation play an increasing role in financial markets.
2007
We investigate several implications of activism by institutional investors/monitors in the microstructure equilibrium postulated by . The decision whether or not to monitor, which reveals the firm's value to the fund, is stochastic. Empirically, we show that net-oftransaction-cost portfolio returns of the daily trades of active institutional fund managers are independent of their stock turnover rates. This is supportive of Noe's equilibrium in which the investor makes informed choices when she monitors and may trade "randomly" when she does not. We then identify the empirical counterpart to these "random" trades in the form of institutional "churning" trades of marginal profitability that have the effect of lowering rather than raising bid-ask spreads. These falls indicate the degree of success in camouflaging informed longer-term positions. While churning trades appear to be subject to psychological biases identified in the behavioral literature, we show that this is not the case, emphasizing their role in improving the institution's trading environment.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2007
We test the corporate theory of managerial herding based on reputation and career concerns (Scharfstein and Stein, 1990) by focusing on the mutual fund industry. We investigate the trade-off between reputation and compensation and study how incentives in the advisory contract affect managerial herding and risk taking. We consider two types of herding: category herding-the choice of operating in a category in which it is easier to preserve reputation, and stock herding-the choice of a trading strategy similar to the ones of the competitors. We show that a high incentive contract induces entry in categories in which an extreme performance realization is more likely, the adoption of trading strategies different from the ones being followed by other funds and higher risk taking. Family affiliation reduces (increases) the tendency to herd (to take risk) and, therefore, reduces the need for high incentive contracts. Moreover, unobserved actions of mutual funds with high incentive contracts induce managers to take performance-enhancing unobserved actions.
2009
The role of institutional investors on the register constitutes a significant puzzle. Concentrated investors could intervene (i.e., exercise "voice") so as to improve firm governance mechanisms. Alternatively, acting as informed traders, they could effectively discipline management if they adopt the "Wall Street rule" and engage in exit (Edmans and Manso ). We derive the optimal incentive contract for a risk-averse manager in the presence of such traders. Then, utilizing unique daily institutional trading data, we show in conformity with the model: (i) a sizeable portion of institutional trading takes the form of "stock churning"; (ii) churning is profitable, (iii) profitability diminishes in the number of investors trading simultaneously; (iv) trading activity is associated with improved pricing efficiency in the form of lower spreads and market impact costs; (v) the number of investors trading simultaneously and magnitude of churning swings due to higher noise-trader volatility significantly improve long-term firm performance; (vi) when concentrated investors do not churn there is no long-term effect; and (vii) investors appear to recognize the benefit of making stock price more sensitive to managerial action since institutional stockholdings are higher in stocks that investors churn. Thus the "threat of exit" speaks more authoritatively than "voice".
Experimental Economics, 2013
In this paper we experimentally investigate the impact that competing for funds has on the risk-taking behavior of laboratory portfolio managers operating under the typical contractual arrangements offered to hedge fund managers. We find that such a competitive environment and contractual arrangement lead, both in theory and in the lab, to inefficient risk taking behavior on the part of portfolio managers. We then study various policy interventions, obtained by manipulating various aspects of the competitive environment and the contractual arrangement of fund managers, e.g., the transparency of the contracts offered, the risk sharing component in the contract linking portfolio managers to investors, etc. While all these interventions would induce portfolio managers, at equilibrium, to efficiently invest funds in safe assets, we find that, in the lab, transparency is most effective in incentivising managers to do so. Finally, we document a behavioral "Other People's Money" effect in the lab, where fund managers tend to invest the funds of their investors in a more risky manner than their own money, even when it is not in the investors' interest nor in the managers' incentives to do so.
New J Phys, 2010
Despite the availability of very detailed data on financial market, agent-based modeling is hindered by the lack of information about real trader behavior. This makes it impossible to validate agent-based models, which are thus reverse-engineering attempts. This work is a contribution to the building of a set of stylized facts about the traders themselves. Using the client database of Swissquote Bank SA, the largest on-line Swiss broker, we find empirical relationships between turnover, account values and the number of assets in which a trader is invested. A theory based on simple mean-variance portfolio optimization that crucially includes variable transaction costs is able to reproduce faithfully the observed behaviors. We finally argue that our results bring into light the collective ability of a population to construct a mean-variance portfolio that takes into account the structure of transaction costs.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
We relate the performance of mutual fund trades to their motivation. A fund manager who buys stocks when there are heavy investor outflows is likely to be motivated by the belief that the stocks are significantly undervalued. In contrast, when there are heavy inflows, the manager is likely to be motivated to work off excess liquidity by buying stocks. Our analysis reveals that managers making purely valuation-motivated purchases substantially beat the market but are unable to do so when compelled to invest excess cash from investor inflows. A similar, but weaker, pattern is found for stocks that are sold. (JEL G11, G29) Fund managers of actively managed equity mutual funds buy and sell stocks for different reasons. Chief among their motivations is to generate trading profits based on valuation beliefs. However, the structure of open-end funds also leads them to trade for other reasons. First, unanticipated investor flows force managers to continually rebalance their portfolios to control liquidity. 1 Second, a desire to minimize taxable distributions creates incentives for them to sell losers heading into the tax year-end. 2 Finally, aspiring to impress investors, managers may window-dress their portfolios by buying recent winners and selling recent losers just before reporting dates. 3 In a rational expectations framework, trades primarily motivated by reasons other than valuation beliefs place managers in the role of noise traders who
Standard models of moral hazard predict a negative relationship between risk and incentives; however empirical studies on mutual funds present mixed results. In this paper, we propose a behavioral principal-agent model in the context of professional managers, focusing on active and passive investment strategies. Using this general framework, we evaluate how incentives affect the risk taking behavior of managers, using the standard moral hazard model as a special case. Our propositions suggest that managers of passively managed funds tend to be risk averse and tend to be rewarded without incentive fees. On the other hand, in actively managed funds, whether incentives reduce or increase the riskiness of the fund depends on how hard it is to outperform the benchmark. If the fund is likely to outperform the benchmark, incentives reduce the manager's risk appetite. Furthermore, the evaluative horizon influences the trader's risk preferences, in the sense that if traders performed poorly in a period, they tend to choose riskier investments in the following period given the same evaluative horizon. If the fund is unlikely to outperform the benchmark, the opposite is true; incentives cause increased risk taking, and if traders performed well in a given time period, they tend to choose more conservative investments following that time period.
2005
Utilizing a database of daily institutional fund manager trades, we examine the contribution of strategic trading at quarter-end associated with potential 'portfolio pumping' or 'ramping up' of reported stock prices around quarter ends. We provide the first direct evidence that active fund managers tend to purchase illiquid stocks on the last day of the quarter, in stocks in which they already hold overweight portfolio positions. Consistent with the way fund managers are evaluated, we find the poor-performing managers display greater evidence of portfolio pumping. Both increased regulatory scrutiny and improvements to market microstructure design reduce the severity of stock price changes at quarter ends.
Management Science, 2011
We develop a framework in which we simultaneously model the interactions among investors, fund companies (represented by fund advisors), and managers. In this framework, we show that the interplay between a manager's incentives arising from her compensation structure and career concerns leads to a non-monotonic (approximately U-shaped) relation between her risk choices and prior performance relative to her peers. We empirically analyze the risk-taking behavior of a large sample of fund managers and find significant support for the predicted U-shaped relative risk-prior performance relation. Reputation concerns and employment risk plays a crucial role in driving the non-monotonic relation; significant out performers (under performers) are less (more) likely to be fired in the future, and are also more likely to increase relative risk. We also show empirical support for the additional testable implications of the theory that link determinants of the fund flow-performance relation and managerial career concerns to risk-taking behavior. Funds with higher expense ratios have less convex fund flow-performance relations and less convex U-shaped relative risk-prior performance relations.
Journal of Financial Services Research, 2004
This paper investigates how a linear contract offered to a portfolio manager affects her incentives to acquire precise information. I show that increasing the manager's portfolio share increases her demand for precise information. This result contrasts with the existing irrelevance results where the manager's portfolio share does not affect her precision choice. The irrelevance result relies on the manager facing a constant asset price, regardless of her demand. In a noisy rational expectations framework, increasing the manager's share decreases her demand and results in a less informative asset price. Thus, the manager gathers more precise information when offered a larger fraction of portfolio returns.
Financial Markets, Institutions & Instruments, 1995
ii Declaration By submitting this thesis/dissertation, I declare that the entirety of the work contained therein is my own, original work, that I am the sole author thereof (save to the extent explicitly otherwise stated), that reproduction and publication thereof by Stellenbosch University will not infringe any third party rights and that I have not previously in its entirety or in part submitted it for obtaining any qualification.
NYU Working Paper No. FIN-01-014, 2001
This paper investigates whether dealers' trading and pricing decisions are governed by their equivalent inventories (based on total returns as in Ho and Stoll, 1983 or on unhedgeable returns as in Froot and Stein, 1998) or by their ordinary inventories, as would be the case in a decentralized market-making organisational structure. It finds that ordinary inventories, and not equivalent inventories best explain dealers' quote placement strategy, which dealer executes trades and the quality of execution offered to the trades. This finding is consistent with decentralized market making where, due to information sharing difficulties or the nature of compensation contracts, individual dealers care only about risk of stocks managed by them, and not the positions of other dealers within the firm. Do Correlated Exposures Influence Intermediary Decision-Making? Evidence from Trading Behavior of Equity Dealers 1. specialists' inventories on the NYSE; Lyons (1995) studies the inventory of one FX dealer; Mann, and Manaster (1996) examine behavior of scalpers in the Chicago futures market; Neuberger (1992), and Snell, and Tonks (1998) study the aggregate inventory of all London equity dealers while Hansch, Naik, and Viswanathan (1998) and Reiss and Werner (1998) examine individual dealer inventories. Chan, Christie, and Schultz (1995) document evidence consistent with active inventory control.
2009
An important puzzle in financial economics is why fund managers invest in short-maturity assets when they could obtain larger profits in assets with longer maturity. This work provides an explanation to this fact based on labor contracts signed between institutional investors and fund managers. Using a career concern setup, we examine how the optimal contract design, in the presence of both explicit and implicit incentives, affects the fund managers decisions on investment horizons. A numerical analysis characterizes situations in which young (old) managers prefer short-maturity (long-maturity) positions. However, when including multitask analysis, we find that career concerned managers are bolder and also prefer assets with long maturity.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
This paper is the first to analyze the price effects of equity trading by a pension fund. We find that, on average, these effects are nonnegligible: 20 basis points for buys and 26 basis points for sells. Furthermore, we show that (relative) trade size and market capitalization, commonly found to play an important role, have only limited influence on the price impact of a trade. The most important determinants of the price effect are investment style, trade type (agency, single, or principal), momentum, stock price volatility, and trading venue.
Journal of Financial Intermediation, 2011
Following extensive empirical evidence about "market anomalies" and overconfidence, the analysis of financial markets with agents overconfident about the precision of their private information has received a lot of attention. However, all these models consider agents trading for their own account.
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