The thesis Mutual Fund Managers’ Prior Work Experience andTheir Investment Skill, coauthored by Professor Xueyong ZHANG, AssociateProfessor Rui CHEN, 2016 undergraduate graduate Zhennan GAO (now Ph.D.candidate of Peking University) of CUFE School of Finance and Associate ProfessorMin ZHU of the University of Queensland (formerly of Queensland University ofTechnology), was published in the first issue of Financial Management,Volume 47, 2018, and the paper was recently named by the journal as one of thetop 20 downloads of all the paper published by Financial Management in2017-2018, winning the Top Downloaded Article Award for 2017-2018. FinancialManagement is the authoritative journal of the International FinancialManagement Association (FMA) and one of the Second Tier academic journals inthe financial academic field. It was founded in 1972, issued four times a yearand aimed at providing high-quality academic research results for academia andpractitioners in non-financial companies as well as financial institutions.Currently, the journal has a five-year impact factor of 1.811.
One of the authors of the thesis, Zhennan GAO, is a 2012undergraduate student of the Financial Engineering Program of the School ofFinance, and this paper is also one of the academic achievements of herparticipation in the third outstanding academic talents training program heldby the School of Finance. Since 2011, the School of Finance has held annually atraining program for outstanding academic talents. Focusing on outstandingundergraduates with academic potential, the program aims to conduct academictraining and academic guidance in advance, help students establish academicambitions and academic ideals, in order to cultivate better academic talents.This award-winning academic paper is also a full affirmation of this project.
Mutual Fund Managers’ Prior Work Experienceand Their Investment Skills
Abstract：
This paper examinesthe relationship between mutual fund managers’ past professional backgroundsand their portfolio performance, using Chinese mutual fund data from 2003to2016. We focus on managers with prior work experience either as industryanalysts or as macro analysts, the two most common career paths for Chinesefund managers. We hypothesize that manager who worked as industry analystsexhibit superior stock-picking skills, while managers with a background asmacro analysts are more skillful in timing the market. These hypotheses aresupported by the data, even after controlling for observable fund and managercharacteristics. Bootstrap analyses suggest that the significant difference inperformance between these two types of managers cannot be attributed purely toluck.
Key words：
Managerial skills; stock-picking; market-timing; bootstrap
