In this paper we study the drawdown status of hedge funds as a hedge fund characteristic related to performance. A hedge fund's drawdown status is the decile to which the fund belongs in the industry's drawdown distribution (at a given point in time). Economic reasoning suggests that both the...

Fund managers are double agents; they serve both fund investors and owners of management firms. This conflict of interest may result in trading to support securities prices. Tests of this hypothesis in the Spanish mutual fund industry indicate that bank-affiliated mutual funds systematically...

Banking crises are recurrent phenomena, often induced by ex-ante excessive bank risk-taking, which may be due to behavioral reasons (over-optimistic banks neglecting risks) and to agency problems between bank shareholders with debt-holders and taxpayers (banks understand high risk-taking). We...

We introduce a new dynamic trading strategy based on the systematic mispricing of U.S. companies sponsoring Defined Benefit pension plans. This portfolio produces an average return of 1.51% monthly between 1989 and 2004, with a Sharpe Ratio of 0.26. The returns of the strategy are not explained...

This paper documents that at the individual stock level, insiders' sales peak many months before a large drop in the stock price, while insiders' purchases peak only the month before a large jump.We provide a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon based on trading constraints and asymmetric...

We define two measures: the Model Performance Ratio (MPR), which ranks asset pricing models based on their ability to price random portfolios, and the Rate of Market Efficiency (RME), which measures market efficiency assuming the best pricing model (largest MPR). We find that: (i) market...

We analyze the interaction between growth and financial development in a model of product innovation. Innovation is risky and can be monitored only imperfectly and at a cost. Financial intermediaries emerge endogenously to avoid the duplication of monitoring activities and negotiate contracts...

This paper addresses the question of how a fiscal rule of a general type can preserve the sustainability of public finances and provide automatic stabilisation, taking as given interest rates and price stability. This issue can be considered complementary to the analysis of monetary policy...

Our basic premise is that fund managers performance is related to superior information about an asset payoff. We investigate the relationship between managerial skills and trading behavior within a two-period rational expectation equilibrium (REE) model where agents trade on private information...