This paper presents an overview of the European mutual fund industry and investigates mutual fund performance using a survivorship bias controlled sample of 506 funds from the five most important mutual fund countries. The latter is done using the Carhart (1997) 4-factor asset-pricing model. In addition we investigate whether European fund managers exhibit`hot hands', persistence in performance. Finally the influence of fund characteristics on risk-adjusted performance is considered. Our overall results suggest that European mutual funds, and especially small cap funds are able to add value, as indicated by their positive after cost alphas. If we add back management fees, four out of five countries exhibit significant outperformance at an aggregate level. Finally, we detect strong persistence in mean returns for funds investing in the UK. Our results deviate from most US studies that argue mutual funds under-perform the market by the amount of expenses they charge.

In the present paper a comprehensive assessment of existing mutual fund performance models is presented. Using a survivor-bias free database of all US mutual funds, we explore the added value of introducing extra variables such as size, book-to-market, momentum and a bond index. In addition to that we evaluate the use of introducing time-variation in betas and alpha. The search for the most suitable model to measure mutual fund performance will be addressed along two lines. First, we are interested in the statistical significance of adding more factors to the single factor model. Second, we focus on the economic importance of more elaborate model specifications. The added value of the present study lies both in the step-wise process of identifying relevant factors, and the use of a rich US mutual fund database that was recently released by the Center for Research in Security Prices. Copyright AFAANZ, 2004..

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