Yet Another Puzzle? The Relation between Price and Performance in the Mutual Fund Industry

Abstract

Gruber (1996) drew attention to the puzzle that investors buy actively-managed funds even though, on average, they under-perform index funds. We uncover another puzzling fact about the market for actively-managed equity mutual funds: funds with worse before-fee performance charge higher fees. We then conduct a series of robustness checks and find that the apparently anomalous fee-performance relation survives all of them. Finally, we show that this relation may be explained as the outcome of strategic fee setting by mutual funds in the presence of investors with different degrees of sensitivity to performance.

Keywords: Mutual fund performance, mutual fund fees, investors' performance sensitivity

JEL Classification: G11, G23, L1