The consensus view of the influential economist John Maynard Keynes is that he was a stellar investor. We provide an extensive quantitative appraisal of his performance over a quarter-century in both calendar and event time, and present detailed empirical analysis of his archived trading...

We examine the relative weights hedge fund investors attach to past information in the fund selection process. The weighting scheme appears inconsistent with econometric forecasting models that predict fund returns, alphas or Sharpe ratios. In particular, investor flows are highly sensitive to...

Fund managers can only exhibit selectivity through purchasing (selling) stocks that appreciate (depreciate) more frequently than expected from random occurrence, if stocks are incorrectly priced. We develop a method that can statistically identify fund managers that exhibit net, buy, and sell...

We hypothesize and find that the value of active management depends on characteristics of markets and investors. Using unique data, we focus on the performance of actual passive and active equity positions of an important category of institutional investors (defined benefit pension plans) from...

Stocks with high sentiment betas are more sensitive to investor sentiment, with more subjective valuations. We contend that sentiment beta also captures the duration of mispricing. Accordingly, stocks with high (low) sentiment betas provide opportunities for momentum (contrarian) traders. We...

Do more active hedge fund managing strategies generate higher returns than the less active ones? We develop a novel approach to measuring activeness for hedge funds by estimating the dynamics of risk exposure of a large sample of live and dead equity long-short funds. We find that higher...

Continuously rebalanced long-short trades are similar to highly levered trades in that their PNL profile depends not only on the final distribution of return, but also on the realized co-variance structure of the asset pair. It's easily possible for both orientations of a rebalanced long-short...

I build a model of delegated asset management with moral hazard and security lending. Lending markets transfer informational rents from short-sellers to funds. Investors optimally receive the proceeds as state-contingent dividends which correlate with shorting demand, providing a natural hedge....

This study shows that mutual fund managers vary in their reliance on category-level information, relative to firm-specific information about assets. Moreover, fund performance decreases with managers' propensity to rely on categories. Fund managers display less skill in picking stocks which are...

This study proposes that the performance of mutual fund managers is linked to how efficiently they allocate attention across assets in their investment set. Motivated by existing models of optimal portfolio choice and rational inattention, we posit that the efficiency of attention allocation...