Grades Matter in Performance: Morningstar Stewardship Grades and Mutual Fund Performance

Investors in mutual funds have the unenviable task of disentangling two mutually confounding effects. First, to fathom the future performance of the funds based on current evidence, and second, to assess how well the mutual fund managers will steward their investments under uncertain economic conditions. We corroborate the dependence of weighted risk-adjusted returns (viz. the Star Ratings) on corporate governance score (viz. Stewardship Grade) accounting for fund specific characteristics. We document Stewardship scores Granger cause Star Rating. We propose an objective data-driven corporate governance score based on the components of Stewardship Grade. Both the static and dynamic fixed-effects models show strong predictive relationship between performance with corporate governanc