In this article, we provide the busy reader with a survey of articles that were written over the past four years on hedge funds. Specifically, we review the economic basis for hedge fund returns and then discuss some of the logical consequences of these observations. Next, we summarize the...

Hedge funds do not easily fit into the current way institutions go about investing. Based on a survey of recent academic and practitioner research, this article reviews six competing frameworks for how to incorporate hedge funds in institutional portfolios. Each framework has very different...

We develop a directional trading model and a crisis management model to measure fund manager skills more adequately. We test the robustness of both traditional market timing models and new management skill models to changes in their underlying investor utility function and excess return...

Investment funds marketed as “sustainable” or “ESG” (Environmental, Social and Governance) have proliferated in recent years. In the wake of this trend, skepticism is looming among the public over the trustworthiness of these financial actors and the distinctiveness of their investment...

We examine the sensitivity of estimates of abnormal performance to models that vary in the degree to which they explicitly control for variation in the regional and emerging market allocations of diversified international mutual funds. Models based on the most commonly used global MSCI...

Although private credit funds have rapidly grown into a standalone asset class over the last decade, little is known about the aggregate performance of these funds. To provide a first look at absolute and relative performance, we utilize the Burgiss database of 476 private credit funds with...

We pursue the first large scale investigation of a strongly growing mutual fund type: Islamic funds. Based on an unexplored, survivorship bias adjusted dataset, we analyse the financial performance and investment style of 265 Islamic equity funds from twenty countries. As Islamic funds often...

As defined contribution (DC) plans have grown and have increasingly become the primary retirement savings vehicle, asset allocators are increasingly interested in incorporating illiquid private assets in these retirement funds to offer participants access to investment portfolios and...

A closet indexer is more likely to meet a value-weighted investment benchmark by value-weighting the portfolio. Following this intuition, we introduce a simple measure of active management, the absolute difference between the value weights and the actual weights held by a fund, averaged across...