Do fixed income mutual fund managers have managerial skills?

Abstract

Motivated by Berk and Green [Berk, J., & Green, R. (2004). Mutual fund flows and performance in rational markets. Journal of Political Economy, 112, 1269–1295] and Chevalier and Ellison [Chevalier, J., & Ellison, G. (1999). Career concerns of mutual fund managers. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 114, 389–432] who show theoretically that performance persistence may be short-lived, we complement Bollen and Busse [Bollen, N., & Busse, J. A. (2004). Short-term persistence in mutual fund performance. Review of Financial Studies, 18, 569–597] and examine performance persistence in high-quality corporate-bond mutual funds over short horizons. Empirically, we find supporting evidence of performance persistence over shorter horizons. Our empirical tests also suggest that the performance persistence we document may be at least partly due to managerial skills.