海角社区

Susan Christoffersen and Sergei Sarkissian, two associate professors of finance at the Desautels Faculty of Management, 海角社区, have been awarded the 2007 Swiss Finance Institute Research Prize for their paper "City Size and Fund Performance." They are the first winners of this prestigious award from outside one of the top 10 U.S. business schools.

Christoffersen and Sarkissian found a positive relation between mutual fund profitability and the size of the metropolitan areas in which fund managers are based. Their research attributes the advantage of big city living to learning effects that improve in a manager's gross and risk-adjusted returns. These effects include the interaction between fund managers and skilled investors, access to better (e.g., private) information and the development of business relations in all types of financial intermediation. The effect is particularly pronounced for New York-based funds.

Christoffersen and Sarkissian determined that the positive relation between profitability and performance is limited to more experienced fund managers. Less experienced managers in metropolitan areas do not do as well, even though they are better educated than their peers in smaller cities. They based their research on the performance of U.S. equity mutual funds and presented their findings in Zurich and Geneva in early December.

The Swiss Finance Institute Research Prize is awarded annually to honour the best paper in banking and finance presented at major professional congresses, such as the American Finance Association, Western Finance Association and the European Finance Association, during the previous 12 months.

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