Burton Malkiel: Asset Management Fees and the Growth of Finance
May 20, 2013 Leave a comment
Asset Management Fees and the Growth of Finance
Burton G. Malkiel
Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 27, Number 2—Spring 2013—Pages 97–108
From 1980 to 2006, the financial services sector of the United States economy grew from 4.9 percent to 8.3 percent of GDP. A substantial share of that increase was comprised of increases in the fees paid for asset management. This paper examines the significant increase in asset management fees charged to both individual and institutional investors. Despite the economies of scale that should be realizable in the asset management business, the asset-weighted expense ratios charged to both individual and institutional investors have actually risen over time. If we exclude index funds (an innovation that has made market returns available even to small investors at close to zero expense), fees have risen substantially as a percentage of assets managed. One could argue that the increase in fees charged by actively managed funds could prove to be socially useful, if it reflected increasing returns for investors from active management or if it was necessary to improve the efficiency of the market for investors who availed themselves of low-cost passive (index) funds. But neither of these arguments can be supported by the data. Actively managed funds of publicly traded securities have consistently underperformed index funds, and the amount of the underperformance is well approximated by the difference in the fees charged by the two types of funds. Moreover, it appears that there was no change in the efficiency of the market from 1980 to 2011. Arbitrage opportunities to obtain excess risk-adjusted returns do not appear to have been available at any time during the early part of the period. Passive portfolios that bought and held all the stocks in a broad-based market index substantially outperformed the average active manager throughout the entire period. Thus, the increase in fees is likely to represent a deadweight loss for investors. Indeed, perhaps the greatest inefficiency in the stock market is in “the market” for investment advice.
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