This paper investigates whether hedge fund of funds managers invest in single-strategy hedge funds in a random fashion. By examining the underlying single-strategy hedge funds from which a fund of funds can select, we find that single-strategy hedge funds added to the portfolio of funds of funds...

Recent research has identified skewness and downside risk as one of the most important features of risk. We present a new distribution which makes modeling skewed risks no more difficult than normally distributed (symmetric) risks. Our distribution is a combination of the "downside" and "upside"...

Undiversified - or stock picking - portfolios may dominate well diversified benchmarks, when these benchmarks are not mean-variance efficient. Starting from Markowitz's Modern Portfolio Theory we derive simple (linear regression) tests to separate stock picking from diversification. Over 60% of...

The inflation risk premium (IRP) in the U.S. stock market varies over time. We use individual stocks to estimate the IRP, because this provides us with a heterogeneous cross-section of exposures. We find that the IRP is a significant -5.5% since the 1960s, but reverses to an insignificant...

We find that commodity risk is priced in the cross-section of US stock returns. Following the financialization of commodities, investors hedge commodity price risk directly in the futures market, primarily via commodity index investments, whereas before they gained commodity exposure mainly via...

We investigate the pricing of private versus public placement bonds in the primary market and test the effect of covenants on yield spreads. The yield spread premium of 116 basis points is partially explained by credit risk but equally important, by covenants. We provide evidence of a U-shape...

We investigate private debt fund returns, disentangling them into a publicly traded and a private component. Studying their time-series and cross-sectional properties, we find a significant private debt premium of around 1.6% per quarter. Fund returns are negatively skewed and have long exposure...

To identify issuer motives, we study the determinants of announcement effects of convertible debt issues in the Canadian market. Classified into equity- and debt-like, wealth effects are significantly more negative for equity-like convertible bond issuers. Equity-like convertibles are...