Financial planners and advisors increasingly recognize that human capital must be taken into account when building optimal portfolios for individual investors. But human capital is not simply another pre-endowed asset class; it contains a unique mortality risk in the form of the loss of future...

Despite the retrenchment of the hedge fund industry in 2008, hedge fund assets under management are currently over one and a half trillion dollars. We analyze the potential biases in reported hedge fund returns, in particular survivor-ship bias and back fill bias. We then decompose the returns...

The authors decomposed their estimated pre-fee 1995–2009 hedge fund return of 11.13 percent into fees (3.43 percent), an alpha (3.00 percent), and a beta (4.70 percent). The year-by-year results show that alphas were positive during every year of the past decade, even during the recent...