Closing of Mutual Funds within Management Company

Abstract

We analyze liquidations and mergers of mutual funds in the United States, the biggest mutual fund’ market in the world. As asset management industry grow, we have more of mergers and liquidations of mutual funds in the market place. We compare funds delisted within asset Management Company and survived funds within the same management company by using matching procedure. For each of the delisted funds we find all survived funds with similar investment style and Total Net Assets (TNA) within the same management company. We show that asset management companies liquidate relatively small funds by TNA with poor performan­ce record and with large asset redemptions. Asset management companies tend to merge larger funds and liquidate smaller funds. Moreover, liquidated funds are younger and have smaller expense ratio comparing to merged funds. Our results emphasize the idea that asset management companies tend to clean out its performance record by closing underperforming funds. We also analyze management company liquidations. Median liquidated management company consists of only one fund and has about $10 million under management (as compared to median asset management company TNA of $300 million). According to regression analysis, smaller size of TNA, lower yearly inflows (larger outflows), and smaller expense ratio are associated with higher probability for management company to be liquidated.