The hedge fund industry has grown from $200 billion in assets under management around the turn of the millennium to now over $3 trillion. Many reports have criticized hedge funds for poor performance, particularly since the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC). In this paper, I seek to demystify...

Using a sample of U.S. international equity mutual funds, we show that funds that hire sub-advisors abroad do not outperform. For example, funds that hire outsourced international sub-advisors underperform on a risk-adjusted basis by up to 126 bps annually, relative to funds that do not...

This paper explores the idea that investors ex ante price the risk that large fire sales by liquidity-shocked blockholders will trigger negative price impacts, referred to as "fragility risk," and argues that fragility risk should be lower for institutional blockholders who can credibly signal...

We exploit the merger between BlackRock and Barclays Global Investors to study how changes in expected ownership concentration affect the investment behavior of funds and the cross-section of stocks worldwide. We find that funds with open-end structures and a large exposure to commonly-held...

Using a novel dataset, I show that hedge fund managers connected through shared employment histories hold and co-trade more of the same stocks than unconnected managers. Results are greater between fund pairs with stronger social connections and longer dated relationships, implying a socially...

Using a comprehensive international dataset of institutional investor holdings, we study social trust as a source of institutional investment biases. Our findings indicate that national trust-levels affect the investment allocation of institutional investors between domestic and foreign equity...

This paper examines the effect of investor-level real-world investment constraints, including several which had not been studied before, on hedge fund performance and its persistence. Using a large consolidated database, we demonstrate that hedge fund performance persistence is significantly...

This paper proposes a novel database merging approach and re-examines the fundamental questions regarding hedge fund performance. Before drawing conclusions about fund performance, we form an aggregate database by exploiting all available information across and within seven commercial databases...

This paper documents a significant time-series momentum effect that is consistent and robust across all examined conventional asset classes from 1969 to 2015. We find that the duration and magnitude of time-series momentum is different in developed and emerging markets, but this is no longer the...