This paper asks whether a personally experienced bubble crash leaves a lasting imprint on investment style. We study this in China’s stock market, where two technology-growth booms —the 2014–2015 Internet boom and the 2025–2026 AI hardware boom—share a similar narrative but are separated by a decade of generational turnover. Following managers across the mutual funds they run from 2013Q1 to 2026Q1, we compare those who lived through the 2015 crash with otherwise similar managers who entered afterwards. We find that the caution of veteran managers reflects a scar rather than a symptom of ageing. Conditional on age and career length, managers who lived through the 2015 crash hold more value exposure and chase technology stocks less when prices have been rising, and this reluctance deepens with how much the crash hurt them—crash-window tenure, performance shortfalls, redemption pressure—rather than with age. These demand differences reach asset prices as well: stocks held disproportionately by managers without bubble memories carry significantly higher subsequent left-tail risk, whereas crash-experienced ownership stabilises the stock, particularly when ownership is broad. Heterogeneous institutional beliefs rooted in career experience therefore shape not only how managers invest but also the crash risk of the assets they hold.

This study constructs a three-dimensional space model based on fund investment styles, using a sample of open-end equity and mixed funds from 2005 to 2021 to measure the degree of style convergence. The research explores how style convergence impacts fund managers’ window dressing behavior. The results indicate that, after accounting for the effects of fund performance, style convergence exacerbates window dressing behavior among fund managers. Specifically, this is reflected in fund managers increasing their holdings in winning stocks and selling off losing stocks, which indirectly highlights the intense competition within China’s open-end fund industry. The findings remain robust after a series of endogeneity and robustness tests. Further analysis reveals that style convergence contributes to the risk of client attrition, thereby intensifying the agency problem within the fund industry. The window dressing effect due to style convergence is particularly pronounced in funds managed by individuals with lower educational backgrounds, lower investment skills, smaller family sizes, and lower institutional investor ownership. The paper offers valuable insights into the agency problems arising from investment style convergence and provides guidance for mitigating fund managers' self-interested behavior.

As “sin” stocks and “brown” stocks generally earn higher returns than “green” stocks, fund managers face a trade-off between profitability and sustainability preferences when investing in environmental, social and governance (ESG). We explore the investment styles of ESG funds in the Chinese A-share market and analyze the behavior of ESG funds in terms of asset allocation and portfolio adjustment. We find that ESG funds prefer stocks with high return performance over stocks with high ESG performance. Textual analyses of prospectuses reveal a degree of “greenwashing” behavior by ESG funds. Overall, we show that ESG funds not purely ESG-driven.

We evaluate how prior mutual fund working experience affects private fund managers' performance. Using a novel Chinese private fund database from 2012 to 2016, we document significantly lower excess returns and higher left-tail risks for private fund managers with prior mutual fund working experience. Such effect is concentrated in switched managers with lower performance ranks in mutual funds. Additionally, the underperformance is attributable to reduced research support, change in investment styles, and deteriorated market timing skills, while incentive schemes help alleviate such underperformance. Our findings demonstrate the key role of industry-specific human capital in the asset management industry.

This work investigates the shifting phenomena of the funds investment style under the ranking pressure, based on all the investment funds from 2006 to 2008 in China with the statistics methods. We find that there is the tendency that the funds develop the similar investment styles, and there is quite difference between the active styles and the declared styles. The investment style drifts can be found in the funds. The market expectation and performance ranking are the important factors which influence the drifts. The changes of funds managers is a good explanatory variable about funds style drift in Europe and the United States but not in our country. In addition, this paper reveals that there is a different degree of style drifts between the top and the bottom funds in the performance ranks, and the top funds are more active in the style drift than the bottom funds. Our conclusion is, the top ranking funds execute actively under the ranking pressure which is benefit for the fund investors.