This paper shows that portfolio constraints have important implications for management compensation and performance evaluation. In particular, in the presence of portfolio constraints, allowing for benchmarking can be beneficial. Benchmark design arises as an alternative effort inducement...

This paper shows that portfolio constraints have important implications for management compensation and performance evaluation. Concretely, in the presence of portfolio constraints, allowing for benchmarking can be beneficial. Benchmark design arises as an alternative effort inducement mechanism...

We formally test the age-old question of whether professionally managed equity funds outperform portfolios of stocks selected at random, also known as ‘dartboard' or ‘monkey' portfolios. We examine the case of UK equity mutual funds between 1980 and 2011. We employ alpha and the t-statistic...

We firmly believe that style-appropriate, investible benchmarks not only provide a more parsimonious way of describing manager performance, but also that their use better aligns performance evaluation with the real world performance targets of fund managers'. It is against such benchmarks that...