We propose a measure of dispersion in fund managers׳ beliefs about future stock returns based on their active holdings, i.e., deviations from benchmarks. We find that both the level of and the change in dispersion positively predict subsequent stock returns on a risk-adjusted basis. This effect...

We investigate whether skilled hedge fund managers are more likely to pursue unique investment strategies that result in superior performance. We propose a measure of the distinctiveness of a fund's investment strategy based on historical fund return data. We call the measure the "Strategy...

This paper analyzes the geographical preferences of hedge fund investors and the implication of these preferences for hedge fund performance. We find that funds of hedge funds overweight their investments in hedge funds located in the same geographical areas and that funds of funds with a...

The extant corporate investment literature has documented that information asymmetry and agency conflicts between managers and outside investors prevent firms from making optimal investment decisions. In this study, we investigate whether government intervention, as another form of friction,...

We examine how the rent-seeking incentives of local government motivate private firms1 listed in China to establish political connections, and whether such connections lead to more concentrated corporate control structures. Our results show that such firms are more likely to establish political...

Between 2001 and 2007, annual institutional funding in highly leveraged loans went up from $32 billion to $426 billion, accounting for nearly 70% of the jump in total syndicated loan issuance over the same period. Did the inflow of institutional funding in the syndicated loan market lead to...

One of the most important developments in the corporate loan market over the past decade has been the growing participation of institutional investors. As lenders, institutional investors routinely receive private information about borrowers. However, most of these investors also trade in public...

It is well known that the out-of-sample performance of Markowitz's mean-variance portfolio criterion can be negatively affected by estimation errors in the mean and covariance. In this paper we address the problem by regularizing the mean-variance objective function with a weighted elastic net...

We propose a new measure of time-varying tail risk that is directly estimable from the cross section of returns. We exploit firm-level price crashes every month to identify common fluctuations in tail risk across stocks. Our tail measure is significantly correlated with tail risk measures...

This paper ?nds that fund herding, de?ned as the tendency of a mutual fund to follow past aggregate institutional trades, is an important predictor of mutual fund performance. Examining actively managed U.S. equity mutual funds over the period 1990-2009, we ?nd that funds with a higher herding...