We show that institutions invest in stocks within an industry that maintain exposure to their underlying industry risk factor. These "pure play" stocks have greater numbers of institutional investors and institutions systematically overweight them in their portfolios while underweighting low...

Over the past decade, European investment funds have substantially increased their investment in dollar-denominated assets to more than 3.8 USD trillion, which should give raise to substantial currency hedging if US investor have reciprical currency exposures in their international portfolios....

Hedge fund managers differ in ability and investors want to distinguish good ones from bad. Via the design of their investment strategies, better fund managers want to ease this inference problem while worse fund managers want to complicate it. We impose only the minimal restrictions on the...

This study examines whether the standard compensation contract in the hedge fund industry aligns managers' incentives with investors' interests. I show empirically that managers' compensation increases when fund assets grow, even when diseconomies of scale in fund performance exist. Thus,...

This article analyzes the effect of liquidity risk on the performance of various hedge fund portfolio strategies. Similarly to Avramov et al. (2007), we find that, before accounting for the effect of liquidity risk, hedge fund portfolios that incorporate predictability in managerial skills...

We examine the relative weights hedge fund investors attach to past information in the fund selection process. The weighting scheme appears inconsistent with econometric forecasting models that predict fund returns, alphas or Sharpe ratios. In particular, investor flows are highly sensitive to...

We show that when only a few investors own a substantial portion of a hedge fund's net asset value, flow volatility increases because investors' exogenous, idiosyncratic liquidity shocks are not diversified away. Using confidential regulatory filings, we confirm that high investor concentration...

While it is established that idiosyncratic volatility has a negative impact on the cross-section of future stock returns, the relationship between idiosyncratic volatility and future hedge fund returns is largely unexplored. We document that hedge funds with high idiosyncratic volatility...

This study examines several aspects of active portfolio management by equity hedge funds between 1996-2013. Consistent with the idea that cross-sectional return dispersion is a proxy for the market's available alpha, our results show that equity hedge funds achieve their strongest performance...

We show that when only a few investors contribute a substantial portion of a fund's equity, the probability of large liquidity-driven fund outflows increases because investors' idiosyncratic liquidity shocks are not diversified away. Using confidential regulatory filings, we find the five...