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Compensation incentives and risk taking behavior: evidence from mutual funds

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  • Athanasios Orphanides

Abstract

This paper examines the role of compensation contracts in determining risk taking decisions by money managers in the financial industry. A methodology is developed for empirically testing and assessing the magnitude of the effect that incentive contracts have on risk taking in the mutual fund industry using paneldata. The methodology exploits the within-year cross sectional variation in the performance of mutual funds to identify systematic time series variation in risk taking. Growth and growth and income mutual funds in the 1976 to 1993 period are examined. The evidence suggests that incentive compensation has substantial influence on risk decisions. A strong seasonal component on average risk is present with risk reaching a peak in the first quarter of the year. However the relationship between within-year performance, especially towards year-end, appears to have changed over time. For losing managers, excess risk taking appears early in the sample but not in later years. For winning managers, reductions in risk taking appears towards year-end in later years but not early in the sample.

Suggested Citation

  • Athanasios Orphanides, 1996. "Compensation incentives and risk taking behavior: evidence from mutual funds," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 96-21, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedgfe:96-21
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Athanasios Orphanides & Brian K. Reid & David H. Small, 1994. "The empirical properties of a monetary aggregate that adds bond and stock funds to M2," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue Nov, pages 31-51.
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    Cited by:

    1. Dhruv Desai & Ashmita Dhiman & Tushar Sharma & Deepika Sharma & Dhagash Mehta & Stefano Pasquali, 2023. "Quantifying Outlierness of Funds from their Categories using Supervised Similarity," Papers 2308.06882, arXiv.org.
    2. Alexander Kempf & Stefan Ruenzi, 2008. "Tournaments in Mutual-Fund Families," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 21(2), pages 1013-1036, April.
    3. Ching-Chang Wang & Jerry Yu, 2018. "The holdings markup behavior of mutual funds: evidence from an emerging market," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 50(2), pages 393-414, February.
    4. Vipul Satone & Dhruv Desai & Dhagash Mehta, 2021. "Fund2Vec: Mutual Funds Similarity using Graph Learning," Papers 2106.12987, arXiv.org.
    5. Azleen Shabrina Mohd Nor* & Nahariah Jaffar & Zarehan Selamat & Salmi Mohd Zahid & Norhazlin Ismail, 2018. "Corporate Influences and Financial Reporting Quality in Pre- and Post-Adoption of the Malaysian Financial Reporting Standards," The Journal of Social Sciences Research, Academic Research Publishing Group, pages 52-60:3.
    6. Dhagash Mehta & Dhruv Desai & Jithin Pradeep, 2020. "Machine Learning Fund Categorizations," Papers 2006.00123, arXiv.org.
    7. Éric Jondeau, 2004. "Gestion institutionnelle et volatilité des marchés financiers," Revue d'Économie Financière, Programme National Persée, vol. 74(1), pages 157-175.

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