We investigate hedge fund firms' unobserved performance (UP), measured as the risk-adjusted return difference between a fund firm's reported return and hypothetical portfolio return derived from its disclosed long equity holdings. Fund firms with high UP outperform those with low UP by 7.2% p.a....

Pressure from institutional money managers to generate profits in the short run is often blamed for corporate myopia. Theoretical research suggests that money managers' short term focus stems from their career concerns and greater fund transparency can amplify these concerns. Using a...

Pressure from institutional money managers to generate profits in the short run is often blamed for corporate myopia. Theoretical research suggests that money managers' short term focus stems from their career concerns and greater fund transparency can amplify these concerns. Using a...

CAPM alpha explains hedge fund flows better than alphas from more sophisticated models. This suggests that investors pool together sophisticated model alpha with returns from exposures to traditional (except for the market) and exotic risks. We decompose performance into traditional and exotic...

Mutual funds that hold private securities value these securities at considerably different prices. Prices vary across fund families, are updated every 2.5 quarters on average and are revised dramatically at follow-on funding events. The infrequent, but dramatic price changes yield predictable...

This paper investigates empirically whether uncertainty about equity market volatility can explain hedge fund performance both in the cross section and over time. We measure uncertainty via volatility of aggregate volatility (VOV) and construct an investable version through returns on lookback...

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...