The Flow-Performance Relationship in Emerging Market Bond Funds

46 Pages Posted: 5 Feb 2018 Last revised: 12 Aug 2022

Date Written: January 1, 2018

Abstract

This working paper was written by David Leung (Hong Kong Monetary Authority) and Max Kwong (Hong Kong Monetary Authority).

We investigate the relationship between net inflow to mutual bond funds that invest in emerging market economies (EMEs) and the past performance of these funds. Our main finding is that EME bond funds display a convex flow-performance relationship. In other words, past performance is a significant factor driving fund inflow when the fund return is positive but its influence vanishes when the return is negative. This convex flow-performance relationship is arguably attributable to practices taken by fund management companies to dampen fund investors’ incentives to redeem in reaction to poor performance, bias of media coverage towards outperforming funds, and the relatively high participation costs of EME bond funds. Furthermore, we found that fund performance directly and indirectly affects fund flow. In particular, the performance of a volatile fund is typically less influential on its future fund flow. This can potentially be explained by investors’ perception of the volatile return being less informative. We also found that a larger fund would generally record a higher sensitivity in its fund flow in response to a given change of past performance.

Keywords: mutual funds, bond funds, flow-performance relationship, mutual fund flows, convexity

JEL Classification: G15, G20, G23

Suggested Citation

Institute for Monetary and Financial Research, Hong Kong, The Flow-Performance Relationship in Emerging Market Bond Funds (January 1, 2018). Hong Kong Institute for Monetary and Financial Research (HKIMR) Research Paper WP No. 04/2018, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3110360

Hong Kong Institute for Monetary and Financial Research (Contact Author)

(HKIMR) ( email )

Units 1005-1011, 10th Floor, One Pacific Place
88 Queensway
Hong Kong
China

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
170
Abstract Views
781
Rank
319,210
PlumX Metrics