Mutual funds are the common name for the open-end investment companies. This is the dominant investment company today, accounting for roughly 90% of investment comply assets. Assets under management in the mutual fund industry in United States surpassed $ 12.068 trillion by the end of April 2008 . Mutual funds performance is one of the most frequently studied topics in investment area in most countries. The reason for this popularity is availability of data and the importance of mutual funds as vehicles for investment in stock market for both individual and institutions. Since mutual funds have become popular the research has also started to include the ways of finding the right mutual funds. Although the price shares and the income from them may go down as well as up but choosing the right mutual funds can have considerable effects on investors ending wealth. The thesis examines the past performance of mutual funds as a criterion for investors' future choices. In particular, it examines if mutual funds which invested in the Swedish stock market. Swedish funds assets have passed the trillion kronor mark in March 2005, and it is rapidly increasing. We started our analysis by the funds attributes influenced the returns. In our study hypotheses are the fund characteristics i.e. popularity growth cost and management variables are included. These attributes are most frequently used by finance academies to simple and multiple regression analysis is used to test these hypotheses. We do not find any strong evidence that the past performance is a guide to future performance. As most of the results studies, our results may be subject to survivorship bias, because we have included only 33 funds in our sample during the last eight years 2000-2007. Mostly data is collected from Morningstar Sweden, the Swedish Investment fund association and secondary data from some of the mutual funds annual reports .We analyze the data for last eight years from 2000-01-01 to 2007-12-31 and the funds which are invested mostly in Swedish securities. Before and during our thesis different research studies and financial articles were studied relevant to our research thesis. Our research study results shows that the attributes which have some impact on mutual funds returns are risk, fund size, age, fund turnover and management tenure. The results indicate that the hypothesized relationship between mutual funds performance and the explanatory variables are generally upheld. The study provides a comprehensive examination of recent Swedish mutual funds performance by analyzing the funds returns and funds attributes affecting the funds performance and an effort to link performance to funds specific characteristics.

<p>Mutual funds are the common name for the open-end investment companies. This is the dominant investment company today, accounting for roughly 90% of investment comply assets. Assets under management in the mutual fund industry in United States surpassed $ 12.068 trillion by the end of April 2008 .</p><p>Mutual funds performance is one of the most frequently studied topics in investment area in most countries. The reason for this popularity is availability of data and the importance of mutual funds as vehicles for investment in stock market for both individual and institutions. Since mutual funds have become popular the research has also started to include the ways of finding the right mutual funds. Although the price shares and the income from them may go down as well as up but choosing the right mutual funds can have considerable effects on investors ending wealth. The thesis examines the past performance of mutual funds as a criterion for investors' future choices. In particular, it examines if mutual funds which invested in the Swedish stock market. Swedish funds assets have passed the trillion kronor mark in March 2005, and it is rapidly increasing. We started our analysis by the funds attributes influenced the returns. In our study hypotheses are the fund characteristics i.e. popularity growth cost and management variables are included. These attributes are most frequently used by finance academies to simple and multiple regression analysis is used to test these hypotheses. We do not find any strong evidence that the past performance is a guide to future performance. As most of the results studies, our results may be subject to survivorship bias, because we have included only 33 funds in our sample during the last eight years 2000-2007.</p><p>Mostly data is collected from Morningstar Sweden, the Swedish Investment fund association and secondary data from some of the mutual funds annual reports .We analyze the data for last eight years from 2000-01-01 to 2007-12-31 and the funds which are invested mostly in Swedish securities.</p><p>Before and during our thesis different research studies and financial articles were studied relevant to our research thesis. Our research study results shows that the attributes which have some impact on mutual funds returns are risk, fund size, age, fund turnover and management tenure. The results indicate that the hypothesized relationship between mutual funds performance and the explanatory variables are generally upheld. The study provides a comprehensive examination of recent Swedish mutual funds performance by analyzing the funds returns and funds attributes affecting the funds performance and an effort to link performance to funds specific characteristics.</p>

This thesis analyses and compares the performance, performance persistence and fund flows for UK equity unit trusts/OEICs and UK equity unit-linked personal pensions over the sample period January 1980 to December 2007. Unit-linked personal pension funds are an illiquid investment from the investor’s perspective since any invested capital is inaccessible until retirement whereas for unit trusts/OEICs capital invested can be withdrawn at any time. Since decreasing returns to scale from fund flows are the equilibrating mechanism in Berk and Green (2004) that results in no persistence in performance the illiquid nature of unit-linked personal pension funds should ensure more evidence of performance persistence in comparison to unit trusts/OEICs. I find significant evidence using performance ranked portfolio strategies that underlying portfolios that are only composed of unit-linked personal pension funds have greater performance persistence than unit-linked personal pension funds that have underlying portfolios that also include at least a unit trust/OEIC. This evidence is consistent with Berk and Green (2004) since the illiquid nature of personal pension funds results in an attenuated performance fund flow relationship restricting the equilibrating mechanism. However, there are anomalies in the performance persistence results in relation to Berk and Green (2004) but it could be due to the differential between the number of non-surviving unit trusts/OEICs and non-surviving unit-linked personal pension funds. I also find that the performance fund flow relationship based on abnormal returns from a Carhart four factor model for both UK equity unit trusts/OEICs and UK unit-linked personal pensions is convex but the performance fund flow relationship is more attenuated for the unit-linked personal pension funds. For the worst performing unit trusts/OEICs there are outflows on average whereas for unit-linked personal pensions there are fund inflows on average. For performance persistence tests conditional on underlying portfolio fund flows unit trusts/OEICs that have the worst performance but the lowest net fund flows in the ranking period have significantly greater subsequent performance in comparison to the unit trusts/OEICs that have the worst performance but the highest net fund flows in the ranking period. This empirical evidence provides support for Berk and Green (2004) but for the unit-linked personal pension funds the evidence is less convincing. There is very little evidence that UK equity unit-trusts/OEICs or UK equity unit-linked personal pensions produce abnormal returns. These results are robust across the single index (CAPM) model, the Fama and French three factor model and the Carhart four factor model for both conditional and unconditional models. There is also no evidence that unit trusts/OEICs or unit-linked personal pension funds can time the market. There is a significantly negative timing effect across unconditional factor models which becomes insignificant for the conditional models. There is also no evidence that unit trusts/OEICs have significantly different performance than unit-linked personal pension funds.

<p>Previous studies in mutual funds were focused mainly on the US market. The general belief is thatmutual funds in average cannot outperform the market. We decided to test this theory in the lessstudied markets of equity funds in Sweden and Germany. Another controversial point is fees inmutual funds. Therefore we will give an overview of fees in both markets, and analyze the relationbetween fees and performance.This study analyzes the Swedish and the German mutual funds market. For the German market,funds with domicile in Germany and abroad are analyzed separately in order to examine possibledifferences between funds with a domestic domicile, and funds domiciled abroad.1285 funds performances covering period of 2000-2008 were calculated using Jensen’s Alphameasure. The results showed that all funds have on average negative alphas. Approximately 20% offunds in the German market and 12% of the funds in the Swedish market have significantlynegative performance.Regarding fees, there is only a small difference between funds in the German and the Swedishmarket in general, while the difference between funds domiciled in Germany and Luxembourg wassignificantly bigger.Our analysis of the relation between fees and performance showed no significant relationship.</p>

Previous studies in mutual funds were focused mainly on the US market. The general belief is thatmutual funds in average cannot outperform the market. We decided to test this theory in the lessstudied markets of equity funds in Sweden and Germany. Another controversial point is fees inmutual funds. Therefore we will give an overview of fees in both markets, and analyze the relationbetween fees and performance.This study analyzes the Swedish and the German mutual funds market. For the German market,funds with domicile in Germany and abroad are analyzed separately in order to examine possibledifferences between funds with a domestic domicile, and funds domiciled abroad.1285 funds performances covering period of 2000-2008 were calculated using Jensen’s Alphameasure. The results showed that all funds have on average negative alphas. Approximately 20% offunds in the German market and 12% of the funds in the Swedish market have significantlynegative performance.Regarding fees, there is only a small difference between funds in the German and the Swedishmarket in general, while the difference between funds domiciled in Germany and Luxembourg wassignificantly bigger.Our analysis of the relation between fees and performance showed no significant relationship.

During the last decade, investments into the Swedish mutual fund market have increased substantially. The increased popularity of actively managed Swedish equity funds among households and investment companies, correspondingly, funds need to deliver substantial results, raised the importance to evaluate these funds’ performance. This thesis adds to the scarce empirical literature on Swedish equity mutual fund performance. Employing the Fama-French three factor model, it analyzes whether actively managed Swedish equity mu- tual funds outperform the Fama-French benchmarks net- and gross of management fees. The study uses time-series data and constructs equally-weighted portfolios of the 42 Swe- dish based actively managed equity mutual funds investing in Sweden for the period 2003- 2013. The portfolios’ excess returns are calculated by estimating the Fama-French three factor model by means of ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis. The empirical results show that actively managed equity mutual funds over performed the Fama-French three factor benchmarks by an average annualized net- and gross excess return of 3.60 and 4.67 percent respectively. Sorting out the funds by the performance into deciles, the find- ings indicate that management fees influence the performance of the equity mutual funds in the sample of our study. The conclusion is made such that there is an indication that Swedish equity funds’ managers are able to add value above passive investing.

Chapter 1: Intuition suggests that constraint investment strategies will result in losses due to a limited portfolio allocation. Yet prior research has shown that this is not the case for a particular set of constraint mutual funds so-called Socially Responsible Investing, SRI. In this paper I show that such assets do face loses to portfolio efficiency due to their limited asset universe. I contribute to the literature by employing two techniques to estimate asset performance. First, I estimate a DEA based efficiency score that allows for direct comparison between ex-post efficiency rankings and test the ex-ante relevance of such scores by including them into asset pricing models. Second, I further check if these results are consistent when comparing the performance of ethical funds based on the alphas of traditional asset pricing models even after adjusting for coskewness risk. Overall, the results suggest that ethical funds underperform traditional unconstraint investment assets. Chapter 2: Starting after the turn of the millennium, inflation has been persistently higher than the short term T-Bill rate. Following the traditional view, this will imply a negative real rates of return that have become commonplace in the US economy. This paper examines the possibility that if an inflation risk discount contained in nominal rates exist and can explain low or negative real rates, using consumption based asset pricing model. Evidence suggests using the traditional Fisher equation to calculate real rates leads to an overestimate of real rates due to a modest inflation risk premium. To achieve non-negative real rates in a consumption based asset pricing framework the covariance between consumption growth and inflation innovations would have to be at least thirty times larger than empirically found, and in opposite direction, for the Post-Volker era. Still, though the after 2000’s covariance is positive, which suggest a discount on risk free, the magnitude is still too small to explain negativity of real rates. JEL Classification : E21, E31 Key Words : Mutual Funds, Performance, Data Envelop Analysis, Coskewness, Risk Factors, Real Returns, Consumption Bases Asset Pricing Models, Inflation

Made available in DSpace on 2015-12-03T18:33:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Ronaldo_Sueo_Hirota.pdf: 2239401 bytes, checksum: 481be2cb72a80eeb4e9057d7463e34cf (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-03-23 / This study aims to analyze the influence of performance measure in the rankings of multimarket funds in Brazil. The specific objectives sought to understand the concepts and application of the parameters in the evaluation of investment funds performance, present the similarities and differences of performance measures of investment funds, verify the performance of mutual funds in the period of 6 years and applying the Spearman correlation coefficient to describe and measure the relationship between the rankings produced by different levels of performance. The main contribution of this work is to identify if the indicators create different rankings for the individual or corporate investor can decide how to evaluate these funds. It attempted to separate 385 multimarket investment funds which are not exclusive with returns that represent a normal distribution (309 funds) and non-normal distribution (76 funds), in the period of January 2008 to December 2013 to analyze the correlation of rankings between the indexes. The relevance of correlation between the performance measures is if these indexes impact directly in the rankings of multimarket investment funds. Existing high rank correlations, it s clear that it s up to the investor to decide which index to use evaluating the multimarket funds. In the period analyzed, there was a high correlation between the rates of Modigliani, Sharpe and Sortino. The Treynor index was the only one where it was found a low correlation with the others / O presente trabalho tem como principal objetivo analisar a influ??ncia dos ??ndices de desempenho nos rankings dos fundos multimercado no Brasil. Como objetivos espec??ficos, buscou-se compreender os conceitos e aplica????o dos ??ndices na avalia????o de desempenho de fundos de investimento, apresentar as semelhan??as e diferen??as dos ??ndices de desempenho de fundos de investimento, verificar o desempenho dos fundos de investimento no per??odo de 6 anos e aplicar o ??ndice de correla????o de Spearman para descrever e mensurar a rela????o entre os rankings produzidos por diferentes ??ndices de desempenho. A principal contribui????o desse trabalho ?? identificar se os indicadores de desempenho produzem rankings diferentes para que o investidor individual ou corporativo possa decidir como avaliar esses fundos. Buscou-se separar 385 fundos de investimento multimercado n??o exclusivos com retornos mensais que representam uma distribui????o normal (309 fundos) e distribui????o n??o normal (76 fundos), do per??odo de Janeiro de 2008 a Dezembro de 2013 para analisar a correla????o dos rankings entre os ??ndices. A relev??ncia da correla????o entre os ??ndices ?? analisar se a escolha dessas medidas impactam diretamente nos rankings dos fundos multimercado. Existindo alta correla????o, ?? poss??vel afirmar que fica a crit??rio do investidor qual ??ndice utilizar para a avalia????o de fundos. No per??odo analisado, houve alta correla????o entre os ??ndices de Modigliani, Sharpe e Sortino. O ??ndice de Treynor foi o ??nico em que foi constatada baixa correla????o com os demais.

Submitted by Adalto Acir Althaus Junior (adaltojl@yahoo.com.br) on 2017-03-20T19:06:20Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese2_AdaltojL-V_final_corrigida.pdf: 1890382 bytes, checksum: 4a35dbb3a389546a0654556227bf3070 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Pamela Beltran Tonsa (pamela.tonsa@fgv.br) on 2017-03-20T19:09:02Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese2_AdaltojL-V_final_corrigida.pdf: 1890382 bytes, checksum: 4a35dbb3a389546a0654556227bf3070 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-03-20T20:24:40Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese2_AdaltojL-V_final_corrigida.pdf: 1890382 bytes, checksum: 4a35dbb3a389546a0654556227bf3070 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-02-20 / This study aims to investigate the risk shifting behavior of mutual funds to test the hypotheses that managers have incentives to raise risk. We evaluated the effect of performance fees on the level of risk, risk shifting and mutual fund's performance to assess agency costs differences between both mutual funds - with and without performance fees. We observed the mutual fund's volatility level and its changes imposed by the managers. Volatility was estimated by a standard deviation of returns in the last 12 months. The change on the level of risk measured was the risk shifting, that is, the difference between a mutual fund's current portfolio holdings volatility and its past realized volatility, both estimated over past 12 months' period. We used a sample of 203 Brazilian mutual funds which covered the period from 2009 to 2015. We used data from stock prices, Brazilian bonds prices, BDRs prices and the characteristics of these funds. When funds have higher monthly returns, they tend to run negative risk shifting; when they have lower monthly returns, they tend to seek risk by doing positive risk shifting. When the funds decrease their risk (negative risk shifting), they tend to perform better. It is possible to ensure that the funds which charge performance fee have superior performance if compared to those that without performance fee. Also, they have greater positive risk shifting and lower negative risk shifting. However, funds that charged performance fees presented lower levels of risk. These findings suggest that the performance fee can contribute to align interests between mutual funds and their investors. These results are more in accordance to the behavior of risk-averse managers who used their stock selection or market timing ability to ensure a desirable minimum performance, rather than use maximum effort to looking for extraordinary returns. / Este trabalho investiga o comportamento do deslocamento de risco (risk shifting) nos fundos de investimento em ações e suas consequências sobre o desempenho, para examinar a hipótese de que os gestores têm incentivos para elevar o risco dos fundos. Estuda o efeito da taxa de performance sobre o desempenho, o nível de risco e o risk shifting dos fundos para identificar diferenças nos custos de agência entre os fundos que cobram e os que não cobram taxa de performance. Essa avaliação é feita observando-se o nível de risco dos fundos e as variações impostas pelo gestor em torno do nível de risco operado pelo fundo. O risco é medido pelo desvio padrão do retorno mensal realizado pelos fundos nos últimos 12 meses. O risk shifting dos fundos é medido como a diferença entre a volatilidade de um retorno mensal hipotético, estimado a partir das carteiras divulgadas pelos fundos, e a volatilidade do retorno mensal realizado, ambos sobre os últimos 12 meses. A amostra contou com dados de 203 fundos brasileiros de investimento em ações no período de 2009 a 2015. Foram utilizados dados de retorno das ações da BM&F Bovespa, títulos públicos, BDRs e cotas de fundos de investimento, além das características dos fundos. Quando os fundos têm maiores retornos mensais, tendem a fazer risk shifting negativo; quando têm menores retornos mensais; tendem a buscar risco, fazendo risk shifting positivo. Quando os fundos fazem risk shifting negativo tendem a ter desempenho melhor. É possível afirmar que os fundos que cobram taxa de performance têm desempenho superior àqueles que não cobram, fazem maiores risk shiftings positivos e menores negativos. No entanto, fundos que cobram taxa de performance apresentam menores níveis de risco. Esses achados sugerem que a taxa de performance é um instrumento capaz de contribuir no alinhamento de interesses entre os fundos de investimento em ações e seus investidores. Esses resultados estão mais alinhados com o comportamento de gestores avessos a risco, que usam sua habilidade de seleção de ativos ou market timing para garantir um desempenho mínimo desejável, em vez de imprimir esforços para buscar retornos extraordinários.