Authors:

We would like to thank our supervisor Charles Nadeau for his invaluable help in completing this thesis. Furthermore we would like to thank the staff at the Department of Economics at Gothenburg School of Business, Economics and Law and the library staff at the Economics Library at the same university. 2 In this thesis, we study the relationship of 194 mutual funds ’ management fees with respect to the funds ’ risk-adjusted return, the alpha, derived from the four-factor model as defined by Carhart in 1997. This relationship has been investigated in two steps where the initial step consists of estimating the performance of the individual funds by applying the four-factor model. By using time series regressions on each fund against the factors derived from French (2014), we have seen by how much and whether or not the funds has had a positive or negative risk-adjusted excess return over the chosen time period. The second step involved regressing the alphas against the respective management fees in order to see whether or not these fees have been related to the risk-adjusted returns over time. By subdividing this perio