73rd International Atlantic Economic Conference

March 28 - 31, 2012 | Istanbul, Turkey

A performance evaluation of behavioral mutual funds

Friday, 30 March 2012: 4:50 PM
Nikolaos Philippas, Ph.D. , Business Administration, University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece
Fotini Economou, Ph.D., Student , Business Administration, University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece
This paper empirically examines the performance of mutual funds that employ principles of behavioral finance, known as “behavioral mutual funds”. We examine a series of simple as well as risk adjusted performance measures in order to examine weather behavioral mutual funds outperform their benchmark indices and traditional mutual funds, using monthly data for the period January 2001-September 2011. We further contribute to the literature (Wright et al., 2006; Reinhart et al., 2007; Santoni et al., 2010) by examining behavioral mutual funds’ performance in detail during the recent crisis period of 2007–2010.