Within the last five years, Canada, Sweden and New Zealand have joined the ranks of the United Kingdom and other countries in issuing government bonds that are indexed to inflation. Some observers of the experience in these countries have argued that the United States should follow suit. This...

Hospitals play a key role in patient outcomes and spending, but efforts to improve their quality are hindered because we do not know whether hospital quality indicators are causal or biased. We evaluate the validity of commonly used quality indicators, such as mortality, readmissions, inpatient...

This paper proposes a Bayesian method of performance evaluation for investment managers. We begin with a flexible set of prior beliefs that can be elicited without any reference to probability distributions or their parameters. We then combine these prior beliefs with a general multi-factor...

We examine the performance of the offshore hedge fund industry over the period 1989 through 1995 using a database that includes defunct as well as currently operating funds. The industry is characterized by high attrition rates of funds and little evidence of differential manager skill. We...

Measuring the performance of private equity investments (buyout and venture) has historically only been possible over long horizons because the IRR on a fund is only observable following the fund's final distribution. We propose a new approach to evaluating performance using actual prices paid...

We present a comprehensive analysis of the performance and flows of U.S. actively-managed equity mutual funds during the COVID-19 crisis of 2020. We find that most active funds underperform passive benchmarks during the crisis, contradicting a popular hypothesis. Funds with high sustainability...

We study the long-run outcomes associated with hedge funds' compensation structure. Over a 22-year period, the aggregate effective incentive fee rate is 2.5 times the average contractual rate (i.e., around 50% instead of 20%). Overall, investors collected 36 cents for every dollar earned on...

This paper presents a thorough evaluation of target date funds for the period 2010-2020. These funds have grown enormously in assets, reaching $1.4 trillion by the end of 2019. They account for approximately 24 percent of all of the assets in 401(k) accounts. The paper reports on the results of...

Portfolio performance measures using holdings data are panel regressions. The returns of a fund's stocks are regressed on its lagged portfolio weights. Stock fixed effects isolate average performance from time-series predictive ability. Control variables condition fund performance on the...