• Graduate program
    • Why Tinbergen Institute?
    • Research Master
    • Admissions
    • Course Registration
    • Facilities
    • PhD Vacancies
    • Selected PhD Placements
    • Research Master Business Data Science
  • Research
  • Browse our Courses
  • Events
    • Summer School
      • Applied Public Policy Evaluation
      • Deep Learning
      • Economics of Blockchain and Digital Currencies
      • Economics of Climate Change
      • Foundations of Machine Learning with Applications in Python
      • From Preference to Choice: The Economic Theory of Decision-Making
      • Gender in Society
      • Machine Learning for Business
      • Marketing Research with Purpose
      • Sustainable Finance
      • Tuition Fees and Payment
      • Business Data Science Summer School Program
    • Events Calendar
    • Events Archive
    • Tinbergen Institute Lectures
    • 16th Tinbergen Institute Annual Conference
    • Annual Tinbergen Institute Conference
  • News
  • Alumni
Home | Events | Back to the Roots: Ancestral Origin and Mutual Fund Manager Portfolio Choice
Seminar

Back to the Roots: Ancestral Origin and Mutual Fund Manager Portfolio Choice


  • Series
  • Speaker(s)
    Florian Weigert (University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland)
  • Field
    Finance, Accounting and Finance
  • Location
    Erasmus University Rotterdam, room Polak 1-20
    Rotterdam
  • Date and time

    September 09, 2025
    11:45 - 13:00

We exploit variation in the ancestries of U.S. equity mutual fund managers and show that ancestry affects portfolio decisions. Controlling for fund firm location, we find that funds overweight stocks from their managers ancestral home countries in their non-U.S. portfolio by 132 bps or 20.34% compared with their peers. Similarly, funds overweight industries that are comparatively large in their managers ancestral home countries. The documented ancestral biases are pervasive across fund styles and across different manager ancestries. The effect is more pronounced for funds that are less resource-constrained and for managers whose connection to their ancestral home country is more recent. Stocks linked to managers ancestry do not outperform stocks in the same countries and industries but held by managers of other ancestry, con rming that ancestry-linked investments are not informed.