Are Star Funds Really Shining? Cross‐trading and Performance Shifting in Mutual Fund Families
Résumé
We employ transaction data to examine trades among funds affiliated to the same institution.We show that such cross-trades exhibit an average mispricing of 0.18% compared to openmarket trades. This deviation is greater during times of high financial uncertainty, when theexchanged stocks are illiquid and highly volatile, and when the asset manager has weakgovernance and large internal markets. We use an exogenous increase in regulatory scrutinyto establish causality. Our results are consistent with theoretical models of internal capitalmarkets in which the headquarters actively favors its “stars” at the expense of its leastvaluable units.