Hedge fund researchers have long known about backfill bias, typically correcting for it by truncating a fixed number of returns from the beginning of each fund's return series. However, we document that this practice decreases the percentage of backfilled returns by only 25%. Thus, empirical...

We placed over 85,000 retail trades at six retail brokers to validate the Boehmer et al. (2021) algorithm, which uses subpenny trade prices to identify and sign retail trades. The algorithm identifies only 35% of our trades as retail, incorrectly signs 28% of trades, and yields uninformative...

A discontinuity, or kink, at zero in the hedge fund net return distribution has been interpreted as evidence of managers manipulating returns to avoid showing small losses. Instead, we propose alternative explanations for this phenomenon. In particular, we show that incentive fees can...

The voluntary nature of hedge fund database reporting creates strategic listing opportunities for hedge funds. However, little is known about how managers list funds across multiple databases or whether investors are fooled by funds' listing decisions. In this paper, we find that hedge funds...

As is well known, hedge fund databases suffer from various types of serious biases. While many of these biases have been addressed, the delisting bias is much more difficult to control. In this paper, we use information from three hedge fund databases to provide direct estimates of this bias....