Despite its relevance for financial services, the impact of human capital efficiency on mutual fund performance has remained unexplored. In this paper, we attempt to explore this gap in the context of the outbreak of COVID-19 that provides us a unique opportunity to assess human capital's importance during economic pressures. We employ data on 2044 equity funds across sixteen COVID-19 affected Asian countries to analyze the performance, market, and volatility timing after sorting these funds as per their human capital efficiency. Our results show that funds with better human capital efficiency outperform their counterparts that rank lower on human capital efficiency. The outperformance as measured by adjusted Sharpe and Sortino’s ratios, Jensen’s alpha, stochastic dominance, market, and volatility timing remained consistent for the pre-COVID period as well as through the outbreak during which the impact of human capital efficiency became even more significant. These findings have important strategic implications for mutual funds.

尽管它与金融服务相关，但人力资本效率对共同基金业绩的影响仍未得到探索。在本文中，我们试图在 COVID-19 爆发的背景下探索这一差距，这为我们提供了一个独特的机会来评估人力资本在经济压力下的重要性。我们使用 16 个受 COVID-19 影响的亚洲国家/地区的 2044 只股票基金的数据，在根据人力资本效率对这些基金进行分类后，分析其表现、市场和波动时间。我们的结果表明，人力资本效率较高的基金的表现优于人力资本效率排名较低的基金。通过调整后的 Sharpe 和 Sortino 的比率、Jensen 的 alpha、随机支配地位、市场、在 COVID 之前以及整个爆发期间，波动时间保持一致，在此期间，人力资本效率的影响变得更加显着。这些发现对共同基金具有重要的战略意义。