The concept of a market portfolio plays an important role in many financial theories and models. Knowledge of each asset's share of the invested capital markets is both useful information and a good starting point for investors considering the appropriate allocation to the asset. In our latest...

In this paper, I review hedge fund risk using various commonly used measures including market betas, correlations, and porfolio drawdowns. We see a picture emerge that shows hedge funds have historically hedged a fair degree of systematic market risk, especially in the early years, offering...

Hedge funds managed by listed firms significantly underperform funds managed by unlisted firms. The underperformance is more severe for funds with low manager deltas, poor governance, and no manager co-investment, or managed by firms whose prices are sensitive to earnings news. Notwithstanding...

Index providers increasingly offer sustainable stock indices based on ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) ratings of firms. The performance of such indices with ESG tilts is driven by the impact of the applied weighting methodology and by the ESG firm ratings. In this paper, we focus on...

The hedge fund industry has grown from $200 billion in assets under management around the turn of the millennium to now over $3 trillion. Many reports have criticized hedge funds for poor performance, particularly since the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC). In this paper, I seek to demystify...

Using a sample of U.S. international equity mutual funds, we show that funds that hire sub-advisors abroad do not outperform. For example, funds that hire outsourced international sub-advisors underperform on a risk-adjusted basis by up to 126 bps annually, relative to funds that do not...

Using a comprehensive international dataset of institutional investor holdings, we study social trust as a source of institutional investment biases. Our findings indicate that national trust-levels affect the investment allocation of institutional investors between domestic and foreign equity...

This paper explores the idea that investors ex ante price the risk that large fire sales by liquidity-shocked blockholders will trigger negative price impacts, referred to as "fragility risk," and argues that fragility risk should be lower for institutional blockholders who can credibly signal...

We exploit the merger between BlackRock and Barclays Global Investors to study how changes in expected ownership concentration affect the investment behavior of funds and the cross-section of stocks worldwide. We find that funds with open-end structures and a large exposure to commonly-held...