The article reviews and analyses the origins of the hedge fund sector and its development on a worldwide scale. The study reveals that hedge funds had arisen long before 1949 and shows that global financial crises do not occur due to hedge funds because the latter only exploit economic...

Hedge funds are more likely to target firms with high levels of institutional ownership and demonstrate a preference for short-term focused institutional investors. Hedge fund activism generates short run and long run abnormal returns without increasing stock return volatility. Regardless of...

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based technologies represent one of the most debated topics in the financial services landscape. In this respect, during the past months several institutional investors, and namely hedge funds and their managers, have demonstrated a growing interest in the...

After the global financial crisis, systemic risk regulation has taken center stage. Many consider hedge funds a potential threat to financial stability. Regulating hedge funds, however, is necessarily a transnational challenge because no national government alone can effectively control the...

Hedge funds are known to have liquidity-timing capability, but this might be conditional on aggregate market conditions. To test this, we analyze changes in the relation between hedge funds' stock market exposure and aggregate stock market liquidity. Employing an optimal changepoint approach, we...

The paper provides an overview of the hedge fund industry, mainly from a financial stability and European angle. It is primarily based on an extensive analysis of information from the TASS database. On the positive side of the financial stability assessment, hedge funds have a role as providers...

In the presence of rising concern about climate change that potentially affects risk and return of investors’ portfolio companies, active investors might have dispersed climate risk exposures. We compute mutual fund covariance with market-wide climate change news index and find that high...

This paper investigates the sensitivity of the demand for safe government debt to currency unhedged and hedged excess returns in a sample of US mutual funds. We find evidence of active rebalancing towards government bonds that offer relatively higher returns on an unhedged basis, in particular...

This paper studies the impact of banks' dividend restrictions on the behavior of their institutional investors. Using an identification strategy that relies on the within investor variation and a difference in difference setup, I find that funds permanently decrease their ownership shares at...

Forming top quintile portfolios on the Sharpe ratio, the alpha, the information ratio, the excess manipulation proof performance measure EMPPM and the doubt ratio; we find that these portfolios persistently outperform similarly constructed mediocre third quintile portfolios throughout the twelve...