Evaluating and Comparing Systemic Risk and Market Risk of Mutual Funds in Iran Capital Market

Abstract

Mutual funds are one of the most paramount investment mechanisms in financial markets. By playing a financial intermediary role, they give nonprofessionals access to professionally managed portfolios of securities and provide numerous benefits for both the capital market and investors simultaneously. This study evaluated and investigated the systemic risk of mutual funds in the Iran capital market by adopting a Conditional Value at Risk (CoVaR) approach and employing quantile regression. In the finance literature, systemic risk is the probability of a downfall in the financial system when a segment or an individual component gets in distress. This risk can trigger instability or shock in financial markets and the real part of the economy. The results revealed that stock (equity) mutual funds were systemically more important than other funds, including fixed-income and balanced mutual funds, due to the high volatility in their return, which makes them riskier. To compare systemic risk and market risk among mutual funds, funds classified into five different groups based on their systemic risk. According to this categorization, analysis of variance illuminated that the market risk of mutual funds had a direct relationship with their systemic risk, such that a higher systemic risk of a fund stood for higher market risk.