Due to imperfect transparency and costly auditing, trust is an essentialcomponent of financial intermediation. In this paper we study acomprehensive sample of due diligence reports from a major hedge funddue diligence firm. A routine feature of due diligence is an assessmentof integrity. We find...

This paper compares downside risk measures that incorporate higher return moments with traditional risk measures such as standard deviation in predicting hedge fund failure. When controlling for styles, performance, fund age, size, lockup, high-water mark, and leverage, we find that funds with...

In this paper, we investigate why the same hedge fund may report different performance measures in different places. We find that auditing plays an important role in explaining this difference. Although majority hedge funds state they have auditors, a significant proportion of hedge funds are...

We demonstrate that portfolio approach could suffer a serious problem when the sorting variables contain not only true values but also measurement errors. The grouped measurement errors will be embedded into the data used to test financial models and further bias the testing results. To correct...

We examine the risk characteristics and capital adequacy of hedge funds through the Value-at-Risk approach. Using extensive data on nearly fifteen hundred hedge funds, we find that only 3.7% live and 10.9% dead funds are under-capitalized as of March 2003. Moreover, the under-capitalized funds...

In this paper, we study alternative investment vehicles such as hedge funds, funds-of-funds, and commodity trading advisors (CTAs) by investigating their performance, risk, and fund characteristics. Differing from the previous studies that pool these investment vehicles, we consider them as...

Funds of funds are an increasingly popular avenue for hedge fund investment. Despite the increasing interest in hedge funds as an alternative asset class, the high degree of fund specific risk and the lack of transparency may give fiduciaries pause. In addition, many of the most attractive hedge...

In this paper, we examine survivorship bias in hedge fund returns by comparing two large databases. We find that the survivorship bias exceeds 2% per year. We reconcile the conflicting results about survivorship bias in previous studies by showing that the two major hedge fund databases contain...

This paper investigates hedge fund performance and risk. The empirical evidence indicates that hedge funds differ substantially from traditional investment vehicles such as mutual funds. The funds with watermarks significantly outperform the funds without watermarks. The average hedge fund...

This paper examines analysts' security recommendations in the quot;Dartboardquot; column of the Wall Street Journal and tests whether the impact on the recommended security prices is temporary or permanent. We document a two-day announcement effect for the experts' stocks, which exhibits mean...