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...

This paper analyses the performance of maturity transformation strategies during a period of high and low interest rates. Based on German government bond yields from September 1972 to May 2019,we construct a rolling window of bond ladders where long-term assets are financed by short-term...

Poor corporate governance permits unreliable financial reporting by a firm's management. The AGR governance rating is based on the premise that a more accurate assessment of the effects of corporate governance can be formulated by taking this output of corporate governance into account in...

Funds of hedge funds are diversified investment vehicles that provide investors with diversification either across managers within a specific hedge fund strategy or across a wide range of hedge fund strategies. In this paper, we contrast the performance of funds of hedge funds that diversify...

The factors in the widely used Fama-French model experienced a negative average return over the 2010-2019 period. Perhaps surprisingly, such a lost decade is not unprecedented in history, as factor performance in the 2010s is, in fact, remarkably similar to factor performance in the 1990s. By...

Final working paper version. "" Published version: The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 31, Issue 7, July 2018, pp. 2499–2552. Past fund performance does a poor job of predicting future outcomes. The reason is noise. Using a random effects framework, we reduce the noise by pooling...

Using data for the period 1994-2013, we examine the return and risk-taking behavior of hedge funds having at least one female portfolio manager and funds that have all female portfolio managers. Funds with all female managers perform no differently than all male-managed funds and have similar...

We analyze empirical data for 4,000 real-life trading portfolios (U.S. equities) with holding periods of about 0.7-19 trading days. We find a simple scaling C ~ 1 / T, where C is cents-per-share, and T is the portfolio turnover. Thus, the portfolio return R has no statistically significant...