We study the selection of private equity managers (GPs) for over 100,000 capital commitments between 1990 and 2019 by global institutional investors (LPs) choosing from a plausible contemporaneous opportunity set. In addition to chasing GPs with high prior performance, LPs have large...

We study how plan sponsors choose investment management firms from their opportunity set when delegating $1.6 trillion in assets between 2002 and 2017. Two factors play an influential role in choice: pre-hiring returns, and pre-existing personal connections between personnel at the plan (or...

Why do investors keep buying underperforming mutual funds? To address this issue, we develop a one-period principal-agent model with a representative investor and a fund manager in an asymmetric information framework. This model shows that the investors perception of the fund plays the key role...

Private equity has traditionally been thought to provide diversi cation bene ts. However, these benefi ts may be lower than anticipated. We find that private equity suffers from signifi cant exposure to the same liquidity risk factor as public equity and other alternative asset classes. The...

We develop a principal-agent model based on a sequential game played by a representative investor and a fund manager in an asymmetric information framework. The model shows that investors' perceptions of the fund market play the key role in the fund's fee-setting mechanism. The managers' true...

Mandatory filings for UK hedge funds allow analysis of the effect of managerial employment networks on investment behavior. Employment in the same firm leads to significantly more similar investment behavior in terms of raw returns, abnormal performance (alpha), systematic risk (beta), and...

We test relative illiquidity, exemplified through a temporary lock-up, as a partial explanation for the gap between theoretical and empirical weights for real estate in a multi-asset portfolio. Since asset correlations are known to increase in bear markets, reducing their diversification...

We propose a novel methodology that jointly estimates the proportions of skilled/unskilled funds and the cross-sectional distribution of skill in the mutual fund industry. We model this distribution as a three-component mixture of a point mass at zero and two components — one negative, one...

Private equity firms increasingly sell companies to each other in secondary buyouts (SBOs). We examine commonly expressed concerns regarding SBOs using novel and unique datasets. SBOs made by buyers under pressure to spend capital (a minority of transactions) underperform and destroy value for...

Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) provide a clean opportunity and rich data to study the contribution of analysts to the functioning of capital markets. The assessments of freelancing ICO analysts vary in quality and exhibit biases due to the reciprocal interactions of analysts with ICO team...