Manager’s gender and professional credentials in the performance of Polish investment funds

Aim/purpose – This paper focuses on establishing whether investment fund performance is related to managerial characteristics, such as a manager’s gender and professional credentials. Design/methodology/approach – The investigation was conducted on a relatively large study sample covering 275 managers of 98 domestic equity funds operating in Poland in the period 2000-2017. The verification of the hypotheses was based on three groups of research tools, including tests for differences in the mean values and distributions of rates of return in two samples of funds, where a gender and Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) were grouping variables, and regression models, where a gender or CFA were dummy factors implemented into asset pricing models. Findings – The obtained results show that there are no disproportions in the performance achieved by funds managed by men and funds (co-)managed by women or managers with or without CFAs. However, the findings related to the latter variable are ambiguous, in particular when regression methods are employed or basic measures of return are used. Research implications/limitations – In order to clarify the influence of some managerial characteristics on fund performance further research in this field is needed. Nevertheless, the results may be of interest to both individual investors and fund families. Originality/value/contribution – To our knowledge, it is the first paper to evaluate the performance of Polish investment funds in relation to managerial characteristics. Moreover, what contributes to the originality of the research is the application of a relatively extensive set of measures of return and the use of a proprietary database with unique variables describing a fund manager’s profile.