Open-End Funds for Sustainable Economic Growth in China: The Relationship between Load Fees, Performance, and Flows

The financial market, including the fund market, has an increasingly important role in facilitating sustainable economic development. In this study, we examine whether investors react rationally to fund fees through the investigation of the impact of fee structures on investor behavior with open-end funds in China. We aim to determine whether performance influences the effect of the load fee on fund flows. Based on panel data that contained 240 open-end funds for the period of 2008 to 2017, we offer insight into the relationship between fee structure and the flow of open-end funds in China and find that investors react more sensitively to the load fee than operating expenses. Specifically, the coefficients of operating expenses were found to be insignificant in all regression analyses, while almost all the coefficients of load fees were statistically significant. In addition, our findings indicate that the load fee decreases net flow mainly through increasing redemption, and high load fees can make investors more rational to redeem funds with low performance. High load fees can influence investors to sell funds that perform worse in moderately performing funds, where a high load fee can increase investors’ rationality and motivate them to sell funds, resulting in the mitigation of the disposition effect. We also find that investors in larger funds and aggressive growth funds, as well as those who invest with institutional investors and higher liquidity, react more insensitively to load fees, which can be illustrated by the distraction effect.