Topic: Sitting Bucks: Zero Returns in Fixed Income Funds

Speaker: Jaewon Choi, Associate Professor of Finance, Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Date: October 16, 2019 (Wednesday) 

Time: 10:00am-11:30am 

Location: 4-101, Building 4

Language: English 

Abstract: 

Zero returns are highly prevalent in fixed-income funds: on more than 30% of trading days, net asset values (NAVs) do not change. High illiquidity of fund holdings drives this phenomenon, which is further compounded by binding minimum ticks. Consequently, NAVs are extremely stale, and fund returns are highly predictable at daily, weekly, and even monthly horizons. Investors respond by withdrawing capital from overvalued funds, exacerbating the risk of fund runs, while buy-and-hold investors face annual dilution costs of around $2 billion when others opportunistically buy and sell at incorrect prices. Our results reveal persisting shortcomings in existing fair valuation regulations that should correct this problem.

About the speaker: 

Dr. Jaewon Choi is an associate professor of finance at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Choi received his Ph.D. from Stern School of Business, New York University and holds a bachelor's degree from Seoul National University in Korea and a master's from Princeton University. He conducts research in the areas of asset pricing, hedge funds and mutual funds, credit risk, and the effect of monetary policies on financial markets. He has published in the top finance and economics journals including Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Management Science, and Journal of Monetary Economics and has consulting experiences with the nation’s leading brokerage firms and hedge funds as well as central banks. Prior to academia, he has worked in options trading and asset liability management desks in Deutsche Bank Asia.