Fund Manager Replacement and Manipulative Portfolio Management : Application of Contract Theory and Empirical Analysis of Fund Market in Korea The Determinants of Idiosyncratic Volatility

This paper examines the effect of fund manager replacement on investment performances of mutual funds. In managerial labor market of mutual fund industries with information asymmetry about the type and action of a fund manager, separating compensation may not be achievable due to imperfect evaluation of performances of fund managers. This paper extends contract theory to model the situations where a mutual fund offers pooling compensation contract to a fund manager based on his reputation. Under these environments, the fund manager has an economic incentive to acquire private benefit by manipulating performances and then to turn over to other mutual fund. Fund manager’s replacement is an aspect of adverse selection in the managerial labor market of fund industries. That is, a fund manager with low ability can select and manipulate unsuccessful investment portfolio generating loss to fund while he turns over to hide himself in the reputation under pooling contract mechanism. The empirical analysis of this paper provides the significant evidence that, differently from those of mutual funds of which managers stay in the same mutual funds, the fund performances drop after the fund managers turn over to other mutual funds. These empirical evidences support the theoretical prediction that the fund managers have incentive to manipulate short-term performances to maintain reputation for acquiring favorable compensation contracts.