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Offsetting the Incentives: Risk Shifting and Benefits of Benchmarking in Money Management

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  • Alex Shapiro
  • Suleyman Basak
  • Anna Pavlova

Abstract

Money managers are rewarded for increasing the value of assets under management, and predominantly so in the mutual fund industry. This gives the manager an implicit incentive to exploit the well-documented positive fund-flows to relative-performance relationship by manipulating her risk exposure. In a dynamic asset allocation framework, we show that as the year-end approaches, the ensuing convexities in the manager's objective induce her to closely mimic the index, relative to which her performance is evaluated, when the fund's year-to-date return is sufficiently high. As her relative performance falls behind, she chooses to deviate from the index by either increasing or decreasing the volatility of her portfolio. The maximum deviation is achieved at a critical level of underperformance. It may be optimal for the manager to reach such deviation via selling the risky asset despite its positive risk premium. Under multiple sources of risk, with both systematic and idiosyncratic risks present, we show that optimal managerial risk shifting may not necessarily involve taking on any idiosyncratic risk. The manager's policy results in economically significant departures from investors' desired risk exposure. We then demonstrate how constraining the manager's investment opportunity set, via a simple benchmarking restriction, can ameliorate the adverse effects of managerial incentives.

Suggested Citation

  • Alex Shapiro & Suleyman Basak & Anna Pavlova, 2004. "Offsetting the Incentives: Risk Shifting and Benefits of Benchmarking in Money Management," Econometric Society 2004 North American Winter Meetings 583, Econometric Society.
  • Handle: RePEc:ecm:nawm04:583
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    Cited by:

    1. Suleyman Basak & Anna Pavlova & Alexander Shapiro, 2007. "Optimal Asset Allocation and Risk Shifting in Money Management," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 20(5), pages 1583-1621, 2007 21.
    2. Raphaëlle Bellando, 2008. "Le conflit d'agence dans la gestion déléguée de portefeuille : une revue de littérature," Revue d'économie politique, Dalloz, vol. 118(3), pages 317-339.
    3. Vayanos, Dimitri, 2004. "Flight to quality, flight to liquidity, and the pricing of risk," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 456, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    4. Hodder, James E. & Jackwerth, Jens Carsten, 2005. "Incentive contracts and hedge fund management," CoFE Discussion Papers 05/02, University of Konstanz, Center of Finance and Econometrics (CoFE).
    5. Thomas P. Gehrig & Torben Lütje & Lukas Menkhoff, 2009. "Bonus Payments and Fund Managers' Behavior: Transatlantic Evidence," CESifo Economic Studies, CESifo Group, vol. 55(3-4), pages 569-594.
    6. Livio Stracca, 2006. "Delegated Portfolio Management: A Survey Of The Theoretical Literature," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 20(5), pages 823-848, December.
    7. Ming Fang & Rui Zhong, 2004. "Default Risk, Firm's Characteristics, and Risk Shifting," Yale School of Management Working Papers amz2461, Yale School of Management, revised 01 Mar 2005.
    8. Suleyman Basak & Alex Shapiro & Lucie Teplá, 2006. "Risk Management with Benchmarking," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 52(4), pages 542-557, April.
    9. Rigobon, Roberto & Pavlova, Anna, 2005. "Wealth Transfers, Contagion and Portfolio Constraints," CEPR Discussion Papers 5117, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    10. Castaneda, Pablo, 2005. "Portfolio Choice and Benchmarking: The Case of the Unemployment Insurance Fund in Chile," MPRA Paper 3346, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 30 Dec 2006.
    11. JULES H. Van BINSBERGEN & MICHAEL W. BRANDT & RALPH S. J. KOIJEN, 2008. "Optimal Decentralized Investment Management," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 63(4), pages 1849-1895, August.
    12. Lewellen, Katharina, 2004. "Financing Decisions When Managers Are Risk Averse," Working papers 4438-03, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sloan School of Management.
    13. Vikash Ramiah & Imad Moosa & Ben O'Neill & Milica Backulja & Amel Yacoub & Terry Hallahan & John Vaz, 2012. "Tournament behaviour in Malaysian managed funds," International Journal of Managerial Finance, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 8(4), pages 381-399, September.
    14. Ming Fang & Rui Zhong, 2004. "Default Risk, Firm's Characteristics, and Risk Shifting," Yale School of Management Working Papers amz2461, Yale School of Management, revised 01 Mar 2005.
    15. Jackwerth, Jens Carsten & Hodder, James E., 2003. "Incentive Contracts and Hedge Fund Management: A Numerical Evaluation Procedure," CoFE Discussion Papers 03/10, University of Konstanz, Center of Finance and Econometrics (CoFE).
    16. Jose Luiz Barros Fernandes & Juan Ignacio Pena & Benjamin Miranda Tabak, 2010. "Delegated portfolio management and risk-taking behavior," The European Journal of Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 16(4), pages 353-372.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Fund Flows; Implicit Incentives; Risk Taking; Benchmarking; Risk Management; Investments.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G20 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - General
    • D60 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - General
    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty

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