Liquidity Risk in the Universe of Open-End Funds.

Summary This thesis studies the behaviour of investors in open-end mutual funds and its implications to the liquidity risk. We seek to help the fund managers to avoid the "fund run" scenarios where they loss their clients in a sudden way. We begin our research by collecting a unique data set which records the micro-transactions of fund investors. It allows us to monitor investors’ behaviour at the individual level and to accomplish three research articles around this topic. In the first article, we develop a self-exciting counting process to model the stylized facts of fund flows. Therefrom, we highlight a novel risk linked to the fund liability which is different than the asset-related risk documented by the previous literature. We also identify a liquidity contagion among different investors in a same fund. In the next chapter, we study the dispersion in the investing horizons of individual fund clients. These horizons are strongly determined by investors’ characteristics and economic conditions. We show that the fund managers suffer a pre-mature redemption risk, i.e. clients shorten their investing horizons and redeem pre-maturely. Especially, we observe a heterogeneity among investors: long-term ones bring a higher pre-mature redemption risk. In the last chapter, we are interested in the rebalance behaviour. We find that numerous investors hold a multi-funds portfolio and rebalance it to keep the target asset allocation.