What Is In A Name? Mutual Fund Flows When Managers Have Foreign-Sounding Names

wall-street-582921_640“In this paper, we analyze whether potential stereotypes associated with a person’s name affect the investment choices of mutual fund investors. Specifically, we examine whether investors are less likely to invest in mutual funds that are managed by individuals with foreign-sounding names. The mutual fund setting is particularly attractive for studying social bias because fund management is one of the very few occupations where good measures of job performance are available. In particular, the performance of fund managers is observable from fund returns, which allows us to overcome challenges in the prior literature where it has been difficult to account for productivity differences that might be correlated with observable individual attributes.” Read the full paper.

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