Impact of Managerial Commitment on Risk Taking with Dynamic Fund Flows

We present a model with dynamic investment flows, where fund managers have the ability to generate excess returns, and study how forcing them to commit part or all of their personal wealth to the fund they manage affects fund risk taking. We contrast the behavior of a manager who may invest her personal wealth in a private account to a manager who is either forced to commit her wealth to the fund she manages or not allowed to hold risky assets held by the fund privately. We show that a fund managed by a manager with higher ability does not necessarily achieve higher expected returns but achieves lower idiosyncratic volatility. For a manager with constant ability, restrictions placed on her personal account do not influence her choices in the fund, while for a manager whose ability varies stochastically, they result in higher expected returns and idiosyncratic volatilities. Fund strategies can be nonmonotone both in the manager’s commitment level and the ratio of manager to investor wealth. Our results are robust to incomplete information and to competing managers with correlated ability.

The internet appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2946.

This paper was accepted by Neng Wang, finance.