Hedge Fund returns are often highly serially correlated mainly due to illiquidity exposures given that investments in such securities tend to be inactively traded and associated market prices are not always readily available. Following that, observed returns of such alternative investments tend...

Performance measurement is an area of crucial interest in asset valuation and investment management. High volatility as well as time aggregation of returns, amongst other characteristics, may distort the results of conventional measures of performance. In this work, we study the performance of...

We propose a novel methodology that jointly estimates the proportions of skilled/unskilled funds and the cross-sectional distribution of skill in the mutual fund industry. We model this distribution as a three-component mixture of a point mass at zero and two components — one negative, one...

This study develops an empirical algorithm within which the incentive for signaling of private information in course of IPOs is implemented as a conditional, as opposed to an unconditional incentive. Suppose high quality issuers of IPOs signal private information, and suppose presence of cohorts...

We give an explicit algorithm and source code for combining alpha streams via bounded regression. In practical applications, typically, there is insufficient history to compute a sample covariance matrix (SCM) for a large number of alphas. To compute alpha allocation weights, one then resorts to...

In this paper, we study mutual fund performance in terms of timing ability with daily data from 1998 to 2009. A novel timing model is proposed by incorporating the regime-switching framework into the Treynor and Mazuy (1966) model. The volatility follows a generalized autoregressive conditional...

The shape of the flow-performance relationship in the hedge fund industry is not constant over time, but varies across market conditions. We employ a switching regression approach to explain quarterly hedge fund flows, based on two regimes where either inflows or outflows are dominating,...

This paper investigates the alpha generation of the hedge fund industry based on a recent sample compiled from the Lipper/TASS database covering the time period from January 1994 to September 2008. We find a positive average hedge fund alpha in the cross-section for the majority of strategies...

In this paper we analyze the contribution of hedge funds in optimal asset allocations for different investor clienteles. The preferences of specific institutional investors are captured by implementing a Bayesian asset allocation framework that incorporates heterogeneous expectations regarding...

Do more active hedge fund managing strategies generate higher returns than the less active ones? We develop a novel approach to measuring activeness for hedge funds by estimating the dynamics of risk exposure of a large sample of live and dead equity long-short funds. We find that higher...