This paper introduces a cross-country law and finance analysis of the misreporting behavior in the hedge fund industry in terms of smoothing returns so that a fund consistently generates positive returns. We find strong evidence that international differences in hedge fund regulation are...

Performance persistence in the private equity industry is not long-lived. Current fund performance is positively and significantly associated with the performance of the first follow-on fund, but the magnitude of persistence substantially declines afterwards. Persistence, if any, is largely...

We document that investor sentiment is positively related with pre-SEO overpricing and plays an important role in managers' equity issuance decisions. Further, we provide evidence that investor sentiment impacts the SEO discounting and underpricing. High sentiment periods are followed by low...

We study the tournament behavior of sell-side analysts under proper timing and show that a strong non-monotonic relationship exists between analysts' relative forecasting performance early in the tournament and their later deviations from consensus. Given that the highest performers earn...

We develop a dynamic valuation model of private equity (PE) investments by solving the portfolio-choice problem for a risk-averse investor (LP), who invests in a PE fund, managed by a general partner (GP). Key features are illiquidity, leverage, GP value-adding skills (alpha), and compensation,...

We develop a dynamic valuation model of private equity (PE) investments by solving the portfolio-choice problem for a risk-averse investor (LP), who invests in a PE fund, managed by a general partner (GP). Key features are illiquidity, leverage, GP value-adding skills (alpha), and compensation,...

This study analyses the role of private equity backing in initial public offerings (IPOs) using a dataset of 227 companies that went public on the Milan Stock Exchange between January 1995 and December 2007. The evidence rejects the certification and monitoring hypotheses and provides...

Consistent with Chevalier and Ellison (1999), we find that mutual fund managers with degrees from elite universities tend to outperform their counterparts from less elite universities. The abnormal performance can be characterized as “fast performance,” the stocks they select realize excess...

The level of diseconomies of scale in asset management has important implications for tests of manager skill and the expected level of performance persistence. To identify the causal impact of fund size on future returns, we exploit the fact that small differences in returns can cause discrete...

Exploiting a unique opportunity offered by the Italian private equity (PE) market, we examine the hitherto largely unexplored internal rate of return (IRR) of PE investments. Our database covers the entire universe of transactions sponsored by Italian PE investors in Italy up to 2007 and offers...