Recent years have seen increased demand from institutional investors for passive replication products that track the performance of hedge fund strategies using liquid investable assets such as futures contracts. In practice, linear replication methods suffer from poor tracking performance and...

The evaluation of hedge fund performance is challenging given the flexible nature of hedge funds' strategies and their lack of operational transparency. As a result inference about skill is inevitably contaminated by the error in the benchmark model. To address this concern, we propose a model...

Recent studies link mutual fund performance to measures of active management, and this evidence often takes the form of large spreads in unconditional alphas for characteristic-sorted portfolios. Unconditional benchmarks can, however, produce misleading inferences on managerial skill for...

We provide novel evidence on the role of ambiguity aversion in determining the response of mutual fund investors to fund performance. Our analysis is motivated by theoretical models of decision making by ambiguity-averse investors. A key implication of the models is that when investors face...

This paper provides evidence on the interaction between hedge funds' performance and their market liquidity risk and funding liquidity risk. We demonstrate that funding liquidity risk is an important determinant of hedge fund performance. Hedge funds with high loadings on the funding liquidity...

Using a unique dataset we provide new evidence on the significant penalty on client fund performance due to conflicts of interest related to the cross trading (TCT) activities of mutual fund advisers: funds managed by advisers in the top TCT quintile significantly underperform funds managed by...

We provide new evidence on the economic benefits to mutual fund families from having a portfolio of funds with diversified investor fund flows. We show that diversified fund families enjoy greater stability of assets under management, and experience significantly lower net cash outflows during...