Abstract: Traditional research about the passive investors and index were mainly focus on the tracking error and the performance of mutual funds. However, they ignored that, deceptive by name, the passive investors, such as index-tracking funds and ETFs, may have an active impact on the value of the company through large-scale transactions of these passive investors. Focused on the Chinese stock market, this paper investigates whether specific passive investors, the funds and ETFs that track MSCI China index, will actively influence the market valuation after MSCI Index Rebalance. When the passive shareholders, which are always the mutual funds, exceeds a threshold, I find that firms added to the index will have a significant positive return, about X%, to the index itself. Also, I find the firms eliminated out to the index have a significant negative return, about X%, to the index itself. One potential interpretation of these results is that index-rebalancing will lead the index-trackers to buy those stocks added to the index, and these transactions represent a large buy power that will lead the demanding of those stocks to exceed the selling power and this dynamic of trading plus the following transactions of other investors eventually cause a premium and positive return. The firm size will also have an impact on stock performance when the index get rebalanced, partially in that the weight of the index is calculated according to the market value, a calculate method that leads to the higher weight of large companies. If large companies are added to or removed from the index, the trading volume will be larger, causing more transactions dynamic on those stocks.

In the developing Chinese capital market which dominated by individual investors and potentially suffer from more behavioral biases, we simultaneously examine the trading and monitoring role of mutual funds (as the largest institutional investor in China) in corporate acquisition activities where there are potentials for a wide disparity of interest between institutional investors and controlling shareholders. We find the level of holding by all mutual funds is not a superiors indicator of deal quality, there are some evidence that the collective holdings by the largest fund management companies positively relate to the deal quality and they potentially play the monitoring role in M&A event. Our paper contributes to the existing literature that “transient investors” can also gain from monitoring in the market where institutional investors has less dominant position.

This study examines the role of regional develop imbalance on China’s mutual funds investment behaviours after controlling for various firm attributes. Consistent with evidence from developed markets, we find that China’s mutual funds prefer large liquid stocks with better governance arrangement, higher visibility, growth perspective and prudent features. More importantly, our results show that macroeconomic conditions of stock locations affect mutual funds investment decisions. In particular, mutual funds overweight stocks from the emerging inland regions in response to the “development campaign of the western regions”, and they are able to pick out the “Western Stars” to obtain superior performance. Further investigation of stocks from the nine coastal regions suggests that there exists an “invest towards the neighbour south” phenomenon within the developed coastal regions. Although mutual funds are rational by investing into their southern neighbours, the reason of this anomaly remains a puzzle for further investigation.

This study investigates attributes of local firms that determine investment biases using mutual funds holding data across 48 markets. Controlling for variations in market level environments, we find that firm characteristics related to transaction cost, corporate governance, information asymmetry and local familiarity create significant barriers to foreign investments. The extent to which information asymmetry and familiarity constrain investment allocation is more observable for foreign than for domestic investors, even in developed and liberalized markets. However, in emerging and restricted markets, variations in foreign investment bias are mainly driven by market level cross-border investment barriers. Overall, the well-documented “home bias” phenomenon may be a joint effect of both firm and market level investment barriers.

This paper mainly finds that there is return predictability across equity-link firms in China’s stock market. By grouping the shareholder firms according to the shocks translated from their equity-link firms, we construct long-short momentum strategy to capture abnormal return of 2.01% per month, which we call “equity-link momentum”. After an array of adjustments based on risky factors and firm characteristics, the excess returns are still significant. However, the significance of equity-link momentum returns are sensitive to various attention proxies, such as firm size, past performance, turn over and mutual funds’ joint holding measurement, which is consistent with the hypothesis of limited attention.

Using a 2004 Chinese securities regulation that required equity offering proposals and other major corporate decisions to seek the separate approval of minority shareholders, we empirically test the effect of a regulatory increase in minority shareholders’ control over corporate decisions on shareholder value. While the overall stock market reaction to the announcement of the regulation is insignificant, the stock market reaction is more positive for firms with higher institutional (especially mutual fund) block ownership and more negative for firms with higher individual block ownership. The regulation helps deter management from submitting value decreasing equity offering proposals, especially for firms with higher mutual fund block ownership. In addition, value reducing equity offering proposals submitted in the post-regulation period are more likely to be vetoed in firms with higher block ownership of institutional and individual minority shareholders. Overall, our results suggest that the 2004 regulation increases shareholder value, especially in firms with higher mutual fund block ownership.

Until recently, Chinese companies publicly listed in domestic stock exchanges had two classes of stock: tradable and non-tradable shares. These two classes of stock had the same voting, cash flow, and all other legal rights except that non-tradable shares cannot be transferred at the open markets. From 2005 to mid-2007, Chinese government completed the ownership reform, so-called the Split Share Structure Reform (SSSR), to convert all non-tradable shares into tradable shares. Under this reform process, the holders of non-tradable shares had to negotiate with those of tradable shares to determine how much liquidity premium, or the compensation ratio, non-tradable shareholders have to pay to tradable shareholders in order to obtain the liquidity right. This paper starts with a theoretical model to identify the fundamental factors, including price discount before and after the SSSR reform, the percentage of non-tradable shares in total shares, the volatility of tradable share price, and the lockup period, that should determine the compensation ratio. We show that those factors except price discount before the reform are statistically significant in determining the compensation ratio proposed by non-tradable shareholders. We further show that the agency problems also reveal themselves in the compensation ratios. Specifically, when a firm is controlled by a governmental agency, the compensation is higher. However, the compensation is lower when more concentrated in the top ten holders, especially when shares are held by mutual funds. Thus, the evidence is consistent with the notion that the agency problem exists in China’s fund managers. Finally, we show that the existence of agency problems also reduce the importance of fundamental factors in determining the compensation ratios.

The paper examines the price impact of mutual funds in the Chinese equity market from 2000 to 2007. We find there is strong positive correlation between stock returns and mutual fund holding and trading, and the price impact is more significant in mutual-fund buying than mutual-fund selling. Our findings support the hypothesis that the price impact is due to the information advantage of mutual funds.

This paper tests the smart money effects about equity mutual fund flow, and provides some good sights for the international investments. First, it provides some evidence of the outperformance of equity mutual funds using Chinese equity mutual fund data. Then it studies the determinants of mutual fund total net flows, individual net flows, and institutional net flows, and finds that the proportion fee plays an important role. Most importantly, I test the “smart money” effects, confirm its existence, and conclude that institutional net flows are smarter than individual net flows. Finally, I find that the proportion fee has a significant signal effect to direct the net flow of the new money.

Existing literatures indicate that, in Nontradable Shares Reform, institutional investors collude with nontradable shareholders (controlling shareholders) to help them settle a lower compensation ratio. Classifying institutional investors into mutual funds and non-mutual funds, this paper presents a further research upon whether fund governance helps mitigate collusion. Due to the rigorous entry qualifications, and the worldwide reputation as hostage, a foreign background fund is expected to have better governance quality than a domestic fund. Our empirical evidence shows that, relative to those dominated by domestic funds, mutual funds dominated by foreign background funds are less inclined to collude with nontradable shareholders. Introducing foreign institutional investors into domestic markets is Chinese government’s consistent policy. Our evidence indicates that this policy may be beneficial to the sound development of Chinese stock markets. Meanwhile, we find no sufficient evidence that mutual funds dominated by open-end funds are less inclined to collude with nontradable shareholders, although an open-end fund is expected to have better governance quality than a closed-end fund due to the redemption mechanism. As for the effect of ownership structure, it is found that mutual funds with a lower institutional ownership are less inclined to collude with nontradable shareholders. Fund governance seems to deteriorate as institutional ownership increases. Providing an implication for policy making, our evidence suggests that restricting the proportion of fund shares held by institutions may help improve fund governance in China.