Hedge funds often hold illiquid assets whose true value is slowly reflected in reported returns. As a result, reported returns of a hedge fund can become a smoothed version of its true realized returns and, thus, can bias the evaluation of hedge fund performance. To address this problem, we...

This paper investigates the impact of debt covenant protection on the cross section of equity returns with a firm-level covenant index and four sub-indices. We find that firms with weaker covenant protection (lower covenant index levels) earn significantly higher risk-adjusted equity returns...

Recently many mutual funds have created hedge fund-like products for marketing to retail investors. This study empirically examines the value added for investors during the 2007 financial crisis from hedge fund-like mutual funds, including 130/30, market neutral, and long/short equity funds. We...