Mutual Fund Partial Liquidation and Future Performance

Abstract

We examine the determinants of mutual fund partial liquidation and the effect of a negative shock to fund size on performance. We find that older funds from a smaller family with a large number of share classes are more likely to conduct partial liquidation. As fund size decreases after partial liquidation, its performance improves. This effect is more pronounced for funds with stronger pre‐event liquidity constraint and funds that subsequently experience a larger decrease in liquidity, suggesting that liquidity constraint is a contributing factor of fund performance. These findings are consistent with mutual funds having decreasing returns to scale.