The popular perception is that hedge funds follow a reasonably well defined market-neutral investment style. While this long-short investment strategy may have characterized the first hedge funds, today hedge funds are a reasonably heterogeneous group. They are better defined in terms of their...

We test the hypothesis that hedge funds were responsible for the crash in the Asian currencies in late 1997 . To do so, we develop estimates of the changing positions of the largest ten currency funds in one currency, the Malaysian ringgit and to a basket of Asian currencies. Our methodology is...

The returns to hedge funds and other alternative investments are often highly serially correlated in sharp contrast to the returns of more traditional investment vehicles such as long-only equity portfolios and mutual funds. In this paper, we explore several sources of such serial correlation...

Investments in international fixed income securities are exposed to significant currency risks. We collect novel data on mutual fund currency derivatives and document that around 90% of U.S. international fixed income funds use currency forwards to manage their foreign exchange exposure. Funds'...

"This paper studies how portfolios with a global investment scope are actually allocated internationally using a unique micro dataset on U.S. equity mutual funds. While mutual funds have great flexibility to invest globally, they invest in a surprisingly limited number of stocks, around 100. The...

Target Date Funds (TDFs) provide retirement investors, many of whom are unsophisticated or inattentive, with age-appropriate exposures to different asset classes like stocks and bonds. To maintain exposures, TDFs trade actively against market returns, buying stock funds when the stock market...

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...

Index funds are one of the most common ways investors access financial markets and are perceived to be a transparent and low-cost alternative to active investment management. Despite these purported virtues of index fund investing and the introduction of new products and competitors, many funds...

Firms have inefficiently low incentives to innovate when other firms benefit from their inventions and the innovating firm therefore does not capture the full surplus of its innovations. We show that common ownership of firms mitigates this impediment to corporate innovation. By contrast,...

We assess the pattern of Euro Area financial integration adjusting for the role of "onshore offshore financial centers" (OOFCs) within the Euro Area. The OOFCs of Luxembourg, Ireland, and the Netherlands serve dual roles as both hubs of investment fund intermediation and centers of securities...