As long as insider trading has existed, people have been fixated on it. Newspapers give it front page coverage. Cult movies romanticize it. Politicians make or break careers by pillorying, enforcing, and sometimes engaging in it. But, oddly, no one seems to know what's really wrong with insider...

We document abnormal correlations between hedge funds' performance among managers sharing similar elite socio-economic backgrounds. In particular, Columbia, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, and NYU alumni are highly correlated among themselves. We take steps toward linking this...