This paper examines the aggregate asset allocation decisions of
US mutual fund investors, focusing on the effects of economic
conditions. Our results suggest that an expected deterioration in
economic conditions leads mutual fund investors to allocate less
to equity funds and more to money market funds, while an anticipated
improvement in conditions induces rebalancing in the
opposite direction. In addition, we document significant shifts
from risky to less risky assets during crises. These patterns are
stronger in funds with relatively low fees and turnover, consistent
with sophisticated investors being more sensitive to changing
conditions.
Our research indicates that anticipated changes in economic
conditions cause investors to adjust the riskiness of their asset
holdings in sensible ways. Reinforcing this conclusion, investors
who follow such strategies do not face a poorer risk-return tradeoff.
Thus, our results imply that, in the aggregate, fund flows have
at least partly rational motivations. In contrast, fund-level research
documents a set of possibly irrational factors that motivate fund
flows.
Our results also suggest that, taken together, fund investors
play a meaningful role in price formation. Among others, Fama
and French (1989) show that variables such as DEF and TERM have
predictive power for asset prices. We show that these predictive
variables serve as cues for reallocations across asset classes by fund
investors. The relation between aggregate allocations and the proxies
for economic conditions (e.g. the positive relation between
equity flow and TERM) suggests that fund investors contribute to
the relation between the predictive variables and asset prices.
Our evidence suggests that mutual fund investors collectively
respond to the information in forward-looking financial variables.
A reasonable question to ask is whether the financial market proxies
for economic conditions, while well-established in academic research,
are the types of signals that mutual fund investors are
likely to use in their asset allocation decisions. Exactly how investors
make these decisions reaches beyond the granularity of our
data. However, plausible information transmission channels may
include financial analysts, journalists or advisors who rely on
these variables in writing their reports with asset allocation
recommendations.
Although our analysis indicates that time-varying asset allocation
decisions might, by lowering portfolio risk, benefit switching
investors, it is worth noting that the implementation of such strategies
imposes trading costs on the affected funds and disrupts their
investment strategies. These costs are borne predominantly by
buy-and-hold investors who remain with the fund over the cycle.
Thus, our results point to wealth transfers from buy-and-hold
investors to more transient investors seeking to time the business
cycle. Our research also highlights a set of aggregate-level variables
that fund managers can use to anticipate flow variations and reduce
their effects on performance.