This paper investigates the characteristics of US and Canadian pension funds that allocate assets to hedge funds. The typical pension fund that invests in hedge funds is a large sophisticated pension fund that diversi…es its portfolio across numerous classes of investments, private equity in...

We use proprietary data to examine factors that lead hedge fund managers to offer hurdle rates and investigate relative hedge fund performance based on risk-adjusted returns. Using data from 3,571 hedge funds over a 15 year period, we find that funds that do not offer a hurdle rate outperform...

We investigate the valuation effects of German firms targeted by hedge funds and by private equity investors. We argue that both types of investors differ from other blockholders by their strong motivation and ability to actively engage and reduce agency costs. Consequently, we find positive...

This paper studies the long-term effect of hedge fund activism on the productivity of target firms using plant-level information from the U.S. Census Bureau. A typical target firm improves its production efficiency within two years after activism, and this improvement is concentrated in...

This paper estimates hedge fund and mutual fund exposure to newly proposed measures of macroeconomic risk that are interpreted as measures of economic uncertainty. We find that the resulting uncertainty betas explain a significant proportion of the cross-sectional dispersion in hedge fund...

Highly volatile scenarios, such as those provoked by the recent subprime and sovereign debt crises, have questioned the accuracy of current risk forecasting methods. This paper adds fuel to this debate by comparing the performance of alternative specifications for modeling the returns filtered...

Due to the voluntary nature of hedge funds reporting to databases, hedge funds may stop reporting and exit a database not only because of failure, but also as a result of success and reaching the optimal size of assets under management. The existing hedge fund databases do not seem to provide...

Using an optimal changepoint approach, we find a structural change in the relation between hedge funds’ stock market exposure and aggregate stock market liquidity that takes place in the period 2000 to 2002. Before the structural break, market betas have no relation to liquidity and only a few...

We study first-mover advantages in the hedge fund industry by clustering hedge funds based on the type of assets and instruments they trade in, sector and investment focus, and fund details. We find that early entry in a cluster is associated with higher excess returns, longer survival, higher...