We examine international equity allocations at the fund level and show how different returns on the foreign and domestic proportion of portfolios determine rebalancing behavior and trigger capital flows. We document the heterogeneity of rebalancing across fund types, its greater intensity under...

How does sovereign risk affect investors' behavior? We answer this question using a novel database that combines sovereign default probabilities for 27 developed and emerging markets with monthly data on the portfolios of individual bond mutual funds. We first show that changes in yields do not...

Using a measure of global political risk, relative to the U.S., that captures unexpected political conditions, we show that political risk is priced in the cross section of currency momentum and contains information beyond other risk factors. Our results are robust after controlling for...

Momentum strategies have been shown to be robust across asset classes and time periods. The authors examine the momentum effect in an updated sample of emerging markets and show that a zero-cost strategy that purchases past winners and sells past losers generates significantly positive returns...

This paper investigates the relation between downside risk and expected returns on the aggregate stock market in an international context. Nonparametric and parametric Value at Risk (VaR) are used as measures of downside risk to determine the existence of a risk-return tradeoff. For emerging...

Over the past decade, investors and financial advisors have shown renewed interest in increasing international equity exposure. Investors confront one of two key issues in making decisions on their strategic allocations, depending on the starting point of their portfolios: 1) for a U.S.-only...

This paper studies the added value of intentional style herding for mutual fund managers. We find that herding in styles is significant and persistent, especially for active funds. We also report that herding tends to increase after periods of high market volatility, and decrease with sentiment....

We provide evidence that speculative capital of hedge funds is a key determinant for the profitability of optimal carry and momentum strategies in futures markets across asset classes. We construct optimal carry and momentum portfolios from the perspective of a utility maximizing risk averse...

This paper analyzes exit strategies of buyout funds in their portfolio companies following Initial Public Offerings. We use a data set of 222 buyout-backed IPOs in the United States between 1999 and 2008 including hand-collected data about each exit process to draw up a detailed road map of...

Using a novel sample of professional asset managers, we document positive incremental alpha on newly purchased stocks that decays over twelve months. While managers are successful forecasters at these short-to-medium horizons, their average holding period is substantially longer (2.2 years)....