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Kevin Cui On Education as an Informational Edge: How Foreign Education Shapes Fund Managers’ Equity Selection and Performance

Kevin Cui
April 1, 2025
12:15 pm - 1:15 pm
Student Research Workshop

More from this series
Room 108

This paper examines how fund managers’ foreign education backgrounds influence portfolio allocation and investment returns in U.S.-based international equity mutual funds. We find that funds allocate 35.5\% more to equities from their managers’ education countries, reflecting confidence in their education-based knowledge, yet these allocations do not yield statistically significant excess returns at the country level. To assess stock selection ability, we introduce the I-measure, an activeness-based metric we develop to identify top-pick equities. Portfolios of education country top picks generate a 5.31\% annual alpha, while other portfolios show minimal excess returns. These excess returns persist over time and remain robust across alternative activeness measures. Our findings suggest that education serves as a strong, private, and persistent source of investment-relevant information, allowing managers to identify high-performing equities within their education country, even though overall fund performance remains aligned with benchmarks.