The Relation between Performance and Flows of Mutual Funds: Case of the Croatian Fund Market

With pre 2008 euphoria and present depression, inflows to open investment funds and outflows from it shaped general market conditions on the Croatian fund market. This article studies the relationship between performance of open ended investment funds and inflows (outflows) to them on Croatian funds data in an environment without long fund data history, with small number of funds and relatively illiquid underlying equity market. The results suggest that the driving forces behind funds’ flows encompass the combined influence of present month fund’s performance and persistency of past performances. At the end of our analysis we test the significance of the introduced explanatory variables on the data sets that include data for each particular fund. The significance of the introduced explanatory variables varies among different funds, although a general level of the explanatory power is maintained on average.