The Cross-Section of Conditional Mutual Fund Performance in European Stock Markets

This paper implements strategies that use macroeconomic variables to select European equity mutual funds, including Pan-European, country, and sector funds. We find that several macro variables are useful in locating funds with future outperformance, and that country-specific mutual funds provide the best opportunities for fund rotation strategies using macroeconomic information. Speci fically, our baseline long-only strategies that exploit time-varying predictability provide four-factor alphas of 12-13%/year over the 1993-2008 period. Our study provides new evidence on the skills of local versus Pan-European asset managers, as well as how macroeconomic information can be used to locate and time these local fund manager skills