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Journal Article
The truth about hedge funds
Do hedge funds help or hurt the financial markets in which they operate? The highly publicized troubles of Long Term Capital Management have once again focused the attention of policymakers and the press on the hedge fund industry and the cry for its regulation. This Economic Commentary refutes some of the commonly held myths about hedge funds and examines the rationale for regulating them.
Journal Article
Gov. Warsh: marketplace best discipline for hedge funds
Federal Reserve Gov. Kevin Warsh recently told Congress that while hedge funds present risk management challenges, the market provides necessary discipline. He added that the Fed and other agencies are monitoring institutions' exposure to risk.
Working Paper
Returns to Active Management: The Case of Hedge Funds
Do more active hedge fund managers generate higher returns than their less active peers? We attempt to answer this question. Using Kalman Filter techniques, we estimate the risk exposure dynamics of a large sample of live and dead equity long-short hedge funds. These estimates are then used to develop a measure of activeness for each hedge fund. Our results show that there exists a nonlinear relationship between activeness and performance. Using raw returns as a measure of performance, it is found that more active funds outperform the less active ones. However, when risk adjusted returns are ...
Journal Article
Corporate governance and hedge fund management
Conventional thinking about governance issues for hedge funds is to view them as mutual funds or money managers. This article proposes an alternative view -- that hedge fund governance is best understood by looking at limited partnerships or public firms that are similar in terms of either their assets or liabilities. This reasoning suggests that most hedge funds can be classified into only two groups for the purpose of understanding governance issues: funds that engage in proprietary trading and those that are more like private equity partnerships. ; The analysis implicitly explains why ...
Journal Article
Hedge funds take center stage at Atlanta Fed conference
Should high-risk, high-reward hedge fund instruments be regulated and supervised more closely? This question and other policy issues were discussed when industry experts gathered in Georgia.
Working Paper
Market conditions and hedge fund survival
As the hedge fund industry has grown, there has been increased concern that, during sharp market moves, hedge fund failures could exacerbate the deterioration in financial conditions and deepen a crisis. However, there has not been much formal analysis regarding the impact of financial market conditions on hedge fund survival. To help fill this gap, this paper examines the relationship between financial market conditions and the likelihood of hedge fund failure after controlling for performance and other characteristics. The analysis is conducted using data on individual funds and industry ...
Working Paper
Hedge fund holdings and stock market efficiency
We examine the relation between changes in hedge fund stock holdings and measures of informational efficiency of equity prices derived from transactions data, and find that, on average, increased hedge fund ownership leads to significant improvements in the informational efficiency of equity prices. The contribution of hedge funds to price efficiency is greater than the contributions of other types of institutional investors, such as mutual funds or banks. However, stocks held by hedge funds experienced extreme declines in price efficiency during liquidity crises, most notably in the last ...