The Global Menu of Funds

We analyze the names of over 39,000 equity mutual funds sold in 77 countries between 1931 and 2016 in order to provide an aggregate perspective on the global evolution of mutual fund offerings. Despite the previously documented high degree of fund proliferation, we find that country-level fund menus have retained a low dimensionality and progressively converged to a common (“global”) menu. We show that menu convergence is driven by incumbent firms that seem to employ fund proliferation as a strategy to congest the product space and deter market entry