Risk factors, uncertainty, and investment decision: evidence from mutual fund flows from India

Asset pricing theories provide an understanding of the risk factors that determine the price of assets. The identification of risk factors assists investors in seeking out profitable investment opportunities. The difficulty in observing how investors identify such opportunities and how they react to it has largely restricted the literature from determining the factors that matter to an investor. There is a paucity of empirical studies that give insight into the investment decision-making process of an investor. Some of the recent studies that seek to fill this gap have used mutual fund flows to infer which asset pricing model investors use. The fund flows are used as a measure of investors’ response for the identification of a positive net present value investment opportunity. These studies suggest that the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is closest to the asset pricing model used by investors in the US market. Taking this literature forward, we enquire whether investors from Indian markets exhibit a similar pattern when making investment decisions. Using the fund flows to actively managed equity schemes, we have investigated the risk factors that matter for mutual fund investors in India for the period from April 2006 to December 2019. We use alternative performance measure and then evaluate the sensitivity of fund flows to each of the performance measures. Our results suggest that investors assess the performance of competing investment opportunities based on naïve measures. Further, though uncertainty has a negative impact on fund flow, the flow–performance relation is not sensitive to the level of uncertainty.