The relation between fees and return predictability in the mutual fund industry

Marta Vidal, Javier Vidal-García, Hooi Hooi Lean () and Gazi Uddin

Economic Modelling, 2015, vol. 47, issue C, 260-270

Abstract: We propose and test a methodological framework to examine the relation between mutual fund fees and return predictability. Gil-Bazo and Ruiz-Verdu (2009) drew attention to the puzzling fact that funds with worse before-fee performance charge higher fees. We make another contribution to the literature about the market for equity mutual funds: we find strong evidence of predictability for mutual fund fees. Funds with both positive and negative relations with fees show strong evidence of negative return predictability for their fees. Our findings are robust to alternative estimation methods and under the assumption of conditionally heteroskedastic stock returns. Our results also show that conditioning information (e.g. dividend yield, t-bill yield, default spread and term spread) are useful in selecting funds with superior performance and are valuable for asset allocation decisions.

Keywords: Mutual fund performance; Mutual fund fees; Return predictability; Investor's performance sensitivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264999315000632
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecmode:v:47:y:2015:i:c:p:260-270

DOI: 10.1016/j.econmod.2015.02.036

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Modelling is currently edited by S. Hall and P. Pauly

More articles in Economic Modelling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().