This study analyzes the motives for and consequences of funds' credit default swap (CDS) investments using mutual funds' quarterly holdings from pre- to post-financial crisis. Funds resort to CDS investment when facing unpredictable liquidity needs. Funds sell more in reference entities where...

In a frictionless world, a closed-end fund's (CEF's) premium equals its price minus both its NAVPS (net asset value per share) and present value of the net benefits (PVNB) from liquidity enhancement, managerial abilities after costs, and leverage. The premium can differ further due to frictions...

We examine the roles of rational and behavioural factors in explaining long-run premiums/discounts on closed-end funds, using evidence on equity funds from the US and UK. Although the processes by which fund prices converge towards long-run premiums or discounts are similar in the two countries,...

In this paper, we develop a theoretical model to explain the well-established empirical regularities that have been documented in the literature on closed-end funds (CEFs). In the presence of heterogeneous beliefs and short-sale constraints, both the CEF price and the price of the assets that it...

This paper provides a new explanation for closed-end fund (CEF) discounts and premiums using the local martingale theory of asset price bubbles. This is a rational asset pricing model that is shown to be consistent with the existing empirical evidence on CEF discounts/premiums. Additional...

We identify a component of monetary policy news that is extracted from high-frequency changes in risky asset prices. These surprises, which we call "risk shifts", are uncorrelated, and therefore complementary, to risk-free rate surprises. We show that (i) risk shifts capture the lion's share of...

This paper proposes a theory of the equilibrium liquidity premia of private equity funds and explores its asset-pricing implications. The theory is based on the notion that investors are exposed to the risk of facing surprise liquidity shocks, which upon arrival force them to liquidate their...

Funds that invest in illiquid assets report returns with spurious autocorrelation. Consequently, investors need to unsmooth returns when evaluating the risk exposures of these funds. We show that funds investing in similar assets have a common source of spurious autocorrelation, which is not...

This paper addresses the questions whether European mutual fund managers rely on sell-side analyst information with respect to their investment decisions and whether this behavior impacts fund performance. Based on a sample of over 4,300 European mutual funds and around 1.2 million portfolio...