Using unique data on trading commission payments to mutual fund rating companies (MFRCs) by mutual funds in China, this paper investigates whether the conflicts of interest arising from trading commission payments bias MFRCs’ mutual fund star ratings and hence affect their informativeness. We find the rating of a mutual fund is more optimistic when the MFRC either (i) receives trading commission fees from the mutual fund or (ii) can potentially receive fees in the future. The paper further shows that the usefulness of ratings in terms of predicting a fund’s future performance is negatively impacted by conflicts of interest. There is also evidence that investors can see through the problem, responding less enthusiastically (in terms of fund flows) to the ratings of conflicted MFRCs. We further find that the introduction of a rating qualification system that aims to improve mutual fund rating quality exacerbates the rating bias.

Sousa (2010a) shows that the residuals from the common trend among consumption, financial wealth, housing wealth and human capital, cday, can predict quarterly stock market returns better than cay from Lettau and Ludvigson (2001), which considers aggregate wealth instead. In this paper, we use a more appropriate proxy of human capital, which alleviates the potential correlation between the residuals and the regressors and makes the estimation more precise. In addition, we extend housing wealth to household capital by taking durable goods into consideration. The new predictor is proposed accordingly. Empirically, we find that our predictor is superior to the other alternatives.