Measuring Mutual Fund Flow Pressure As Shock to Stock Returns

Abstract

A large and rapidly growing literature examines the impact of misvaluation on firm policies by using mutual fund outflow-induced price pressure to isolate non-fundamental price variation. I demonstrate that the standard approach to computing outflow-induced price pressure produces a measure that is inadvertently a direct function of a stock's actual realized return during the outflow quarter, raising doubts about its orthogonality to fundamentals. After removing these direct measurements of return, outflows generate a fairly negligible quarterly decline in returns, with no subsequent reversal, and many established results in this literature no longer hold. I provide suggestions for future analysis.

Keywords: mutual funds, fire sales, behavioral finance, corporate policy, instrumental variables

JEL Classification: G23, G34, G31, G30, G14