The returns to hedge funds and other alternative investments are often highly serially correlated in sharp contrast to the returns of more traditional investment vehicles such as long-only equity portfolios and mutual funds. In this paper, we explore several sources of such serial correlation...

We document strong comovement in the returns of hedge funds sharing the same prime broker. This comovement is driven neither by funds in the same family nor in the same style, and it is distinct from market-wide and local comovement. The common information hypothesis attributes this phenomenon...

This paper provides evidence on the incidence, characteristics, and performance of activist engagements across countries. We find that the incidence of activism is greatest with high institutional ownership, particularly for U.S. institutions. We use a sample of 1,740 activist engagements across...

We provide evidence on the valuation of equity positions by hedge funds. Reported valuations deviate from standard valuations based on closing prices from CRSP for roughly seven percent of the positions. These equity valuation deviations are positively related to illiquidity and price volatility...

Hedge fund activism removes the diversification discount in targeted conglomerate firms. Targeted conglomerates increase investment in segments with better growth opportunities, while reducing each division's over-reliance on their own cash flow relative to their reliance on cash flows from...

This paper presents a forward looking model for selection of hedge fund investment strategies. Given excess skewness observed in hedge funds' return distributions, we assume that the historical returns have a skew student t distribution. We implement a Bayesian framework to derive the parameters...

Notwithstanding the focus on hedge fund activism, fundamental questions remain. How much does hedge fund activism really matter? What has academic study contributed to the understanding of hedge fund activism? And what, if anything, does research on hedge fund activism illuminate about the...

We investigate hedge fund activism in the corporate bond market. The empirical setting we use is the active enforcement of bondholders' rights during 2003-07 triggered by issuers' violation of a standard bond covenant requiring timely financial reporting. Specifically, we examine differences in...

This paper utilizes a rich literature on institutional investors' governance roles and develops simple measures of institutional discontent expressed through holding, trading and voice channels to predict hedge fund activism target selection. Discontent expressed through all three channels leads...