Public and private equity waves move together. Using quarterly cash-flow data for a large sample of venture capital and buyout funds from 1984-2010, we investigate the implications of this co-cyclicality for understanding private equity cash flows and performance. In the cross-section, varying...

General Partners (GPs) in private equity face a trade-off between focusing their skills and effort on fewer investments to earn higher returns, or investing more broadly to reduce risk through diversification. Using a novel, deal-level dataset of 5,925 global investments from 1999 to 2016, we...

A Self-Exciting Threshold AutoRegressive (SETAR) model is applied to the Italian stock market volatility, to obtain volatility forecasts and Value-at-Risk (VaR) estimates. There is almost nothing dealing with Italian markets in the literature of Threshold models, which have never been used for...

We examine the risk-return characteristics of a rolling portfolio investment strategy where more than six thousand Nasdaq initial public offering (IPO) stocks are bought and held for up to five years. The average long-run portfolio return is low, but IPO stocks appear as ‘longshots’, as...

We develop a new method for detecting portfolio manager activity. Our method relies exclusively on portfolio returns and, consequently, avoids the pitfalls associated with disclosed portfolio holdings. We investigate the link between activity and performance of actively managed U.S. equity funds...

When analyzing relative performance, especially at the institutional level, the traditional data envelopment analysis (DEA) models do not recognize vastly different and important activities as separate functions and therefore cannot identify which function may be the main source of inefficiency....

Trillions of dollars are invested through index funds, exchange-traded funds, and other index derivatives. The benefits of index-linked investing are well-known, but the possible broader economic consequences are unstudied. I review research which suggests that index-linked investing is...

We propose a new method of testing asset pricing models that relies on using quantities rather than prices or returns. We use the capital flows into and out of mutual funds to infer which risk model investors use. We derive a simple test statistic that allows us to infer, from a set of candidate...

Facing investment choices, investors may care more about potentially excess losses in a downtrend market than excess gains in an upside market. Conditional Sharpe ratios (CSR) are statistical ordinates of conditional stochastic dominance (CSD) that measure lower partial risk-adjusted excess...

Many authors underlined the convergence of financial structures towards a model which combines elements of the Anglo Saxon one, where markets prevail, with characteristics of the continental European systems, where intermediaries are predominant. The goal of this paper is to study financial...