Disentangling domiciles and investor locations in international mutual fund data
31 Pages Posted: 23 Nov 2021
Date Written: November 20, 2021
Abstract
We reconcile investor locations with legal domiciles for a large sample of mutual funds from different countries. In general, legal domiciles provide reasonable proxies for investor locations but with several concerns for funds domiciled in Europe. In our analysis, the fund hub of Luxembourg is not the primary source of bias when models of investor location are estimated with domicile level data. We find that when using domicile level data to proxy for investor locations, flow values are most biased for funds domiciled in the UK, Austria, and Germany. Coefficient estimates for a flow-performance model are most biased for German passive equity funds and Irish passive bond funds. A diseconomies of scale model and a price pressure model are best specified when funds from all domiciles are retained in the sample.
Keywords: fund flows; international mutual funds; Eurofidai; domiciles; investor locations; UCITS; Luxembourg
JEL Classification: F21, F36, F55, G15, G23, K33, R39
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