Bond Mutual Funds Research Articles

Overview of bond mutual funds: A systematic and bibliometric review

The focus of this review is to exhibit a thorough analysis of prominent aspects in bond funds literature and their conceptual developments employing the trending bibliometric analysis. The study wa...

Forced Sales and Dealer Choice in OTC Markets

Using novel trade-level data, we study how municipal bond mutual funds trade in response to daily flows. When forced to sell bonds to satisfy redemptions, funds prearrange fewer trades, sell more liquid bonds, and trade with more central dealers, who offer faster execution. Funds are especially likely to turn to more central dealers when trading lower rated bonds, when funds have low cash buffers, and when trading after periods of aggregate outflows. More central dealers charge higher markups when funds demand fast execution.

Does Liquidity Management Induce Fragility in Treasury Prices: Evidence from Bond Mutual Funds

Bond mutual funds holding illiquid assets (e.g., corporate bonds) actively manage their positions in Treasuries to buffer redemption shocks. We argue and show supporting evidence that this liquidity management practice can induce fragility in Treasury prices. We find that Treasury pairs commonly held by bond funds exhibit higher return comovement than pairs with little fund common ownership. This effect is more pronounced during downside markets or when funds experience large outflows, but is weak for corporate bond pairs. We address endogeneity concerns by exploiting two plausibly exogenous events: the outbreak of COVID-19 and the 2003 mutual fund scandal.

Determinants of return rates of Russian equity and bond mutual funds: Active investment strategies and commissions

In our paper, we study the impact of active investment strategies and factors of their success in the Russian market of collective investment — self-confidence of managers, commissions of management companies (MC) — on return rates of mutual funds. For the first time, not only equity mutual funds, but also bond mutual funds are considered as an object of study; the time period is since 2012. Our study is based on data on the structure of mutual fund portfolios provided by Investfunds. We propose a number of original indicators of an active management style and consider the profitability of mutual funds relative to various benchmarks. Based on testing of multivariate regression models, it has been revealed that the return rate of equity mutual funds is negatively affected by a share of stocks in the fund portfolio which are not included in the market index. When managers take into account their previous negative investment experience, it contributes to the growth of mutual fund return rates. Active investment strategies correlate with increased commissions (up to 4.5% of NAV), but they do not allow an investor to receive higher return rates than index investments. An increase in the share of corporate bonds allows the fund manager to outperform benchmarks for bond funds. For the first time, a nonlinear relationship between the size of mutual funds and the value of commissions has been revealed for the Russian market.

Mutual fund flows and fluctuations in credit and business cycles

Several measures of credit-market booms are known to precede downturns in real economic activity. We offer an early indicator for all known measures of credit booms. Our measure is based on intra-family flow shifts towards high-yield bond mutual funds. It predicts indicators such as growth in financial intermediary balance sheets, increase in shares of high-yield bond issuers, and downturns of various measures of credit spreads. It also directly predicts the business cycle by positively predicting GDP growth and negatively predicting unemployment. Our results provide support for the investor demand-based narrative of credit cycles and can be useful for policymakers.

Practical Applications of Green Bonds and Green Bond Funds: The Quest for the Real Impact

Practical Applications In Green Bonds and Green Bond Funds: The Quest for the Real Impact, from the Summer 2020 issue of The Journal of Alternative Investments, author Gabor Gyura (of the University of Pecs in Hungary) investigates whether the rise of green bonds can be expected to lead to the completion of more environmentally friendly projects. Green bond issuance has grown dramatically in recent years, and green bond mutual funds are working hard to catch up. However, Gyura notes that not all green bonds finance high-profile environmental efforts like climate change mitigation, and some green bond funds invest more heavily than others in bonds that specifically fund such projects. Gyura also conducted a worldwide survey of bond issuers to determine whether issuing green bonds helped them complete more green projects. His results suggest the answer is no. Most respondents said their green projects would have been completed whether they had issued bonds labeled as green or not—and the main reason they issue green-labeled bonds is to improve their reputation and help them enter the green-finance market. Therefore, Gyura says there is little evidence that the growth of the green bond market will help to complete more green projects.

Dynamic Liquidity Management by Corporate Bond Mutual Funds

AbstractHow do corporate bond mutual funds manage liquidity to meet investor redemptions? We show that during tranquil market conditions, these funds tend to reduce liquid asset holdings to meet redemptions, temporarily increasing relative exposures to illiquid asset classes. When aggregate uncertainty rises, however, they tend to scale down their liquid and illiquid assets proportionally to preserve portfolio liquidity. This fund-level dynamic management of liquidity appears to affect the broad financial market: Redemptions from the corporate bond fund sector lead to more corporate bond selling during high-uncertainty periods, which generates price pressures and predicts strong return reversals.

Corporate bond mutual funds and asset fire sales

Corporate bond mutual funds engage in liquidity transformation, raising concerns among academics and policy makers that large redemptions will lead to asset fire sales. We find little evidence, however, that bond fund redemptions drive fire sale price pressure after controlling for time-varying issuer-level information that could also affect funds’ trading decisions, using a novel identification strategy that exploits same-issuer bonds held by funds with differing outflows. We attribute our findings, which contrast with those found for equity funds, to funds’ liquidity management strategies. Bond funds maintain significant liquidity cushions and selectively trade liquid assets, allowing them to absorb investor redemption risk without excessively liquidating corporate bonds, even during the 2008 financial crisis.

Bond Mutual Fund Flows, Fund Liquidity, and Broker-Dealer Inventories

Some financial supervisors worry that liquidity transformation within the “shadow banking” sector might threaten financial stability. For example, a mutual fund promising overnight liquidity based on illiquid assets (such as corporate bonds) runs the risk of needing to “fire sale” some assets, with potentially deleterious external effects. One protection against this possibility would be a broker-dealer sector that stands ready to stabilize prices by buying (or selling) for its own inventory. I evaluate the extent to which bond mutual funds’ flows are reflected in broker-dealers’ inventories. Although brokers generally trade in the same direction as the mutual funds, high-yield corporate bonds present an exception. Flows out of high-yield bond funds are associated with a significant increase in dealers’ high-yield bond inventories. These results provide further information about how various types of bond mutual funds handle liquidity demands.

Burned by Leverage? Flows and Fragility in Bond Mutual Funds

Burned by Leverage? Flows and Fragility in Bond Mutual Funds

Active Share and Bond Mutual Funds

In sharp contrast to equity funds, actively managed bond funds have remained popular. This paper explores why by examining how active share affects the performance, risk management, and flows of bond funds. We find that bond funds tend to be highly active and often invest outside of their primary asset classes. Bond funds with higher active share persistently earn higher alphas, demonstrate lower downside risk, and exhibit less flow sensitivity to poor performance (consistent with alleviating investor run risk). In conclusion, our results show that investors tend to benefit from active management in bond funds.

Don't Take Their Word For It: The Misclassification of Bond Mutual Funds

Don't Take Their Word For It: The Misclassification of Bond Mutual Funds

Corporate Bond Market Dysfunction During COVID-19 and Lessons from the Fed's Responses

Changes in the financial sector since the global financial crisis appear to have increased dramatically the demand for liquidity by holders of corporate bonds beyond the ability of the markets to provide it in stress events. The March market turmoil revealed the costs of liquidity mismatch in open-end bond mutual funds. The surprisingly large redemptions of investment-grade corporate bond funds added to stresses in both the corporate bond and Treasury markets. These conditions led to unprecedented Fed interventions, which significantly reduced risk spreads and improved market functioning, with much of the improvements occurring right after the initial announcement. The improved conditions allowed companies to issue bonds, which helped them to maintain employees and investment spending. The episode suggests several areas for further study and possible reforms.

Adverse Scale Effect and Managerial Skill in Mutual Funds: Evidence from Corporate Bond Mutual Funds

This paper examines a sample of corporate bond mutual funds to explore the presence of a decreasing returns to scale effect among mutual funds. Initial results show that on average, fund performance decreases by 13.85 basis points per year when the fund size increases by one standard deviation. The negative and significant relation between fund performance and fund size persists when various robustness tests are conducted. Further results show that the negative effect of scale on performance is related to illiquidity effects, since performance of mutual funds that hold high yield bonds – the least liquid bonds – decreases by a factor of ten times the performance of other funds as size increases. Given the adverse effect of size on performance, we reevaluate the fund manager’s skill. Unlike the common belief that fund managers are not skilled on average, our results indicate that corporate bond mutual fund managers are skilled. Finally, by sorting managers based on their skills, we find that highly skilled managers persistently generate more than 2 million dollars per month for up to 12 months into the future. It implies that a manager’s skill is persistent, and performance is not attributable to luck.

Mutual Fund Dual Holdings and Shareholder-Creditor Conflicts

Mutual fund families increasingly hold bonds and stocks from the same firm. We study the implications of such dual holdings for corporate governance and firm decision-making by exploiting variations in dual ownership resulting from the rise in the popularity of bond mutual funds and from cross-family fund mergers. We present evidence of a reduction in shareholder-creditor conflicts, which allows firms to increase valuable investments and to refinance by issuing bonds with lower yields and fewer restrictive covenants. Overall, our results suggest that fund families internalize the shareholder-creditor agency conflicts of their portfolio companies, highlighting the benefits of such institutional ownership.

How Do Bond Investors Measure Performance? Evidence from Mutual Fund Flows

Which factor model do investors in corporate bonds use? We examine this question by tracking investors’ decisions to invest in actively managed corporate bond mutual funds with a revealed preference approach. Our main result is that all bond factor models are dominated by the simple Sharpe ratio. For all major corporate bond mutual fund styles, the Sharpe ratio explains fund flows better than alphas from bond factor models. Since the Sharpe ratio can be easily manipulated in bond markets, our findings have potentially severe implications for fund mangers as well as active traders and buy-and-hold corporate bond mutual fund investors.

Debt versus Equity in Liquidity Provision

We propose a unified framework to compare and quantify liquidity provision by debt-issuing banks and equity-issuing mutual funds. We show that both types of financial intermediaries provide liquidity by insuring against idiosyncratic liquidity risks. However, they are subject to distinct constraints depending on the contractual form of their liabilities. Banks issue demandable debt, which exposes them to the possibility of panic runs, whereas funds issue demandable equity, which leads to fundamentals-driven outflows. Based on our theoretical framework, we develop the first empirical measure of liquidity provision that can be generally applied across demandable-debt- and demandable-equity-issuing financial institutions: the Liquidity Provision Index (LPI). We find that a dollar invested in bond mutual funds provides 4.8 cents of liquidity, which is economically significant at one-quarter of the liquidity provided by uninsured bank deposits at the end of 2017. The gap between bank and fund liquidity provision has continuously narrowed over time, suggesting a migration of liquidity provision away from the deposit-taking banking sector to equity-funded non-banks. We find Quantitative Easing and post-crisis liquidity regulation to be contributing factors for this trend. Finally, we exploit the 2016 Money Market Reform, in which institutional prime Money Market Funds (MMF) switched from a fixed to a floating share value, to corroborate the effect of contractual forms on liquidity provision.

Sources of Excess Return and Implications for Active Fixed-Income Portfolio Construction

The continued development of indexes, factor frameworks, and attribution tools in fixed-income markets provides a deeper understanding of manager performance and optimal portfolio construction techniques. In this article, the authors use quarterly holdings data for a broad sample of fixed-income mutual funds to attribute active returns to (1) the returns to static factor exposures, such as a structural tilt to credit spreads; (2) time-varying factor exposures, such as varying duration over the cycle; and (3) individual bond security selection. They find that, although bond funds in aggregate demonstrated positive alpha, a nontrivial amount of their performance was driven by exposure to static factors as opposed to dynamic timing or security selection. The authors illustrate how active portfolio managers can employ index products to more efficiently express factor views and help capture more excess return through reduced costs and frictions. TOPICS:Portfolio theory, portfolio construction, fixed-income portfolio management Key Findings • A holdings-based factor model provides more accurate views of the sources of alpha than time-series regressions when managers vary their exposures to factors such as credit spread and duration dynamically. • Active bond mutual funds had positive alpha relative to their stated benchmarks; a nontrivial amount of their performance was driven by exposure to static factors such as duration and credit spread. • Active portfolio managers can employ index products to more efficiently express factor views and help capture more excess return.

Differential Treatment in the Bond Market: Sovereign Risk and Mutual Fund Portfolios

How does sovereign risk affect investors' behavior? We answer this question using a novel database that combines sovereign default probabilities for 27 developed and emerging markets with monthly data on the portfolios of individual bond mutual funds. We first show that changes in yields do not fully compensate investors for additional sovereign risk, so that bond funds reduce their exposure to a country's assets when its sovereign default risk increases. However, the magnitude of the response varies widely across countries. Fund managers aggressively reduce their exposure to high-debt countries and high-risk countries. By contrast, they are more lenient toward core developed markets. In this sense, these economies appear to receive preferential treatment. Second, we document what determines the destination of reallocation ows. When fund managers reduce their exposure to a country in response to its sovereign risk, they shift their assets to countries outside the immediate geographic region while at the same time avoiding countries with high debt-to-GDP ratios and markets to which they are already heavily exposed. These results are supportive of models of sovereign default that assign a nontrivial role to the preferences of international creditors.

Leveraged Bank Loan versus High Yield Bond Mutual Funds

Since the financial crisis, the markets for Bank Loan (BL) and High Yield Bond (HYB) mutual funds (MFs) have grown significantly, with assets under management increasing from $19 billion and $75 billion to close to $117 billion and $225 billion, respectively, as of December 2018. This short paper characterizes the universe of BL MFs and compare it against that of HYB MFs on several dimensions. We document that BL and HYB MFs’ respective market share of leverage loans (LL) and high yield (HY) corporate bonds outstanding increased since the mid-2000s. We also show that in terms of portfolio allocations, HYB and BL MFs hold around 60 percent of B, BB and BBB-rated assets and that exposure to foreign fixed-income markets is relatively small for both types of MFs. Finally, we document that net flows as a share of assets were larger and more volatile for BL MFs than for their HYB counterparts and that HYB MFs significantly outperformed BL MFs since early 2000.