The growth of the hedge fund industry and the proliferation of retail alternative funds in combination with the fundamental reshaping of the regulatory landscape for the hedge fund industry suggest that mutual funds are becoming more like hedge funds as a matter of investment strategy while...

Title IV of the Dodd-Frank Act introduced the most significant regulatory change in the history of the private fund industry. To analyze the effect of Title IV on the private fund industry, we use five years of private fund performance data with over 7,000 reporting private funds. Our findings...

The importance of private fund investor due diligence in the investment allocation process, in capital formation, and in private fund litigation has reached unprecedented levels and is further increasing. To provide the industry with data, data trend analyses, and guidance on applicable legal...

In a continuing low-interest rate environment that stifles fixed income returns, pension funds are under increasing pressure to produce strong returns from other asset classes, including alternative assets like interests in hedge funds, private equity funds, and venture capital funds. As private...

Historically a key advantage of being a public firm was broader access to capital, from a disperse group of shareholders. In recent years, such capital has increasingly become available to private firms as well. We document a dramatic increase over the past twenty years in the number of mutual...

This paper analyzes valuation dynamics of ‘Unicorn' companies, that is, privately held and venture capital-backed companies with a valuation of at least $1 billion. In recent years, Unicorns have received substantial investments from U.S. mutual funds, whose public reporting allows for rare...

We examine the information content of changes in shareholdings after private issuance of public equity (PIPE) by mutual funds that participate in PIPEs in China. The results show that the changes in shareholdings are positively related to alpha and cumulative abnormal return (CAR) for PIPE...

The ownership nationality of large US multinational companies plays an implicit but important role in the current debate over how such companies should be taxed. This paper identifies that role and investigates what is actually known about where these companies’ shareholders reside

We investigate whether business ties with portfolio firms influence mutual funds' proxy voting using a comprehensive data set spanning 2003 to 2011. In contrast to prior literature, we find that business ties significantly influence pro-management voting at the level of individual pairs of fund...

Actively managed mutual funds sell the potential to beat the market by picking stocks that are expected to outperform passive benchmarks like the S&P 500. Funds that are marketed as active vary substantially in the degree to which their portfolio holdings actually differ from the holdings of...