Managing other people's money: An agency theory in financial management industry

Abstract

We build an active asset management model to study the interplay between the career concerns of a manager and prevailing market conditions. We show that fund managers overinvest in market-neutral strategies, as these have a reputational benefit. This benefit is smaller in bull markets, when investors expect more managers to use high-beta strategies, making their performance less informative about their ability than in bear markets. Consequently, fund flows that follow high-beta strategies are less responsive to the fund's performance, and flow-performance sensitivity is higher in bear markets than in bull markets.