The Effect Of Market Structure On Mutual Fund Performance In Taiwan

Abstract

This paper illustrates the relationship between industry concentration and performance in Taiwan’s mutual fund industry. Our research mainly focuses on the relation between a fund’s average performance and market structure. Typically, a fund’s manager who faces price uncertainty will dedicate his efforts to determine the scale and compositions of portfolio to achieve a better performance in the near future. Since mutual funds are price takers, the empirical results for this industry may go beyond the scope of the SCP paradigm.

This study focuses on the open-end equity mutual fund in the Taiwan market, which can be viewed as one representative of emerging markets. Employing three measures of market structure, we find that the higher degree of market concentration always associates with poor performance, which contradicts the structure-conduct-performance (SCP) hypothesis. More interestingly, when market shares of mutual funds have been considered, our empirical results show a U-shape structure-performance relation for mutual funds. When a fund’s market share becomes larger, the negative influence on fund performance of market concentration will get stronger. Similarly, the smaller a fund’s market share the stronger negative impact on fund performance of market concentration, suggesting that mutual funds endowed with too weak or too strong market power can erode their performance. More importantly, these results offer a new thinking toward the mutual fund industry’s organization policy for authorities; that is, maintaining a high competitive environment and encouraging mutual funds to keep moderate and efficient scale is a better way to achieve superior fund performance.