For funds with greater incentives and greater opportunities to inflate returns, we find that (i) returns during December are significantly higher than those during the rest of the year even after controlling for risk in both time-series and the cross-section; (ii) this December spike is greater...

Recently there has been a rapid growth in the assets managed by hedged mutual funds - mutual funds mimicking hedge funds strategies. In this paper, we examine the performance of these funds relative to hedge funds and traditional mutual funds. We find that despite their use of similar trading...

Recently, there has been explosive growth in two products from the hedge fund industry - multi-strategy (MS) funds and funds of hedge funds (FOFs), both of which offer diversification across different hedge fund strategies. In well-functioning markets, both investment vehicles should offer...

Using a comprehensive hedge fund database, we examine the role of managerial incentives and discretion in hedge fund performance. Hedge funds with greater managerial incentives, proxied by the delta of the option-like incentive fee contracts, higher levels of managerial ownership, and the...

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 bene…cial. Benchmark design arises as an alternative effort inducement...

This paper formally analyzes the biases related to self-reporting in hedge fund databases by matching the quarterly equity holdings of a complete list of 13F-filing hedge fund companies to the union of five major commercial databases of self-reporting hedge funds between 1980 and 2008. We find...

This paper studies the confidential holdings of institutional investors, especially hedge funds, where the quarter-end equity holdings are disclosed with a delay through amendments to the Form 13F and are usually excluded from the standard databases. Evidence supports private information as the...

Using new data on the hedge fund investments of institutional investors, this paper is the first to examine the determinants and consequences of intermediation in the hedge fund industry. Our empirical analysis reveals several findings consistent with predictions from the theoretical literature....

Hedge funds are fundamentally exposed to equity volatility, skewness, and kurtosis risks based on the systematic pattern and significant spread in alphas from the existing models that do not control for the higher-moment risks. The spread and pattern in alphas do not disappear with bootstrap...

In this paper, we identify and document the empirical characteristics of the key drivers of convertible arbitrage as a strategy and how they impact the performance of convertible arbitrage hedge funds. We show that the returns of a buy-and-hedge strategy involving taking a long position in...