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...

This paper evaluates persistence in the performance of institutional equity managers. We build on recent work on conditional performance evaluation, using time-varying conditional expected returns and risk measures. We find evidence that the investment performance of pension fund managers...

Using an extensive new data set on U.S. and U.K.-traded closed- end funds, we examine the diversification benefits from emerging equity markets and the extent of their integration with global capital markets. To measure diversification benefits, we exploit the duality between Hansen-Jagannathan...

We use mutual fund flows as a measure for individual investor sentiment for different stocks, and find that high sentiment predicts low future returns at long horizons. Fund flows are dumb money -- by reallocating across different mutual funds, retail investors reduce their wealth in the long...

This paper is based on the premise that knowledge about the alphas of one set of funds will influence an investor's beliefs about other funds. This will be true insofar as an investor's expectation about the performance of a fund is partly a belief about the abilities of mutual fund managers as...

We develop a simple rational model of active portfolio management that provides a natural benchmark against which to evaluate observed relationship between returns and fund flows. We show that many effects widely regarded as anomalous are consistent with this simple explanation. In the model,...

We propose a model where investors hire fund managers to invest either in risky bonds or in riskless assets. Some managers have superior information on the default probability. Looking at the past performance, investors update beliefs on their managers and make firing decisions. This leads to...

This paper examines the proposition that fluctuations in discounts on closed end funds are driven by changes in individual investor sentiment toward closed end funds and other securities. The theory implies that discounts on various funds must move together, that new funds get started when...