Is the formation of investor cliques associated with superior fund performance? Our analysis of more than 2,000 private equity real estate (PERE) funds over three decades reveals outstanding performance among PERE funds dominated by investor cliques. Specifically, cliques with a more extensive...

I develop a new spectrum of moment bounds on the pricing kernel. They stem from the solution of an optimization problem that is complementary to Hansen and Jagannathan's (1991) approach. Economically, they measure the discrepancy between what an optimizing agent could achieve if all assets (that...

Hundreds of papers and hundreds of factors attempt to explain the cross-section of expected returns. Given this extensive data mining, it does not make any economic or statistical sense to use the usual significance criteria for a newly discovered factor, e.g., a t-ratio greater than 2.0....

Hundreds of papers and hundreds of factors attempt to explain the cross-section of expected returns. Given this extensive data mining, it does not make any economic or statistical sense to use the usual significance criteria for a newly discovered factor, e.g., a t-ratio greater than 2.0....

Our paper explores the link between cross-sectional fund return dispersion and performance evaluation. The foundation of our model is the simple intuition that in periods of high return dispersion, which is associated with high levels of idiosyncratic risk for zero-alpha funds, it is easier for...