Pre-COVID Performance and Risk Assessment of Asset Management Companies; Evidence from an Emerging Market

Abstract

By using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL), and the Emerging Market Z-Score Model, we have examined the performance and factor of riskiness of Pakistan's asset management companies, for the years pertaining to 2013-2018. Moreover, we also tested the stability of the ARDL model. The findings reveal that microeconomic and macroeconomic factors have a long-run impact on the performance of asset management companies (AMCs). Besides this, the Emerging Market Z-Score Model also categorizes the asset management industry in the safe zone, which indicates that the industry has no probability of default. This study was delimited to Pre-COVID data available for asset management companies that were taken into consideration. We can arguably conclude that the Post-COVID performance, and riskiness of AMCs might have inconsistent outcomes with our study. This study's findings may encourage, and aid investors, fund managers, and market makers to revisit their long-term investment patterns, keeping in mind the post-COVID short term volatility dynamics of the industry, which was the primary limitation of this study.