Search Results
Working Paper
Credit Supply and Hedge Fund Performance: Evidence from Prime Broker Surveys
Constraints on the supply of credit by prime brokers affect hedge funds' leverage and performance. Using dealer surveys and hedge fund regulatory filings, we identify individual funds' credit supply from the availability of credit under agreements currently in place between a hedge fund and its prime brokers. We find that hedge funds connected to prime brokers that make more credit available to their hedge fund clients increase their borrowing and generate higher returns and alphas. These effects are more pronounced among hedge funds that rely on a small number of prime brokers, and those ...
Report
Leader-Follower Dynamics in Shareholder Activism
Motivated by the rise of hedge fund activism, we consider a leader blockholder and a follower counterpart who first trade in sequence to build their blocks and then intervene in a firm. With endogenous fundamentals and steering dynamics, the leader ceases to trade in an unpredictable way: she buys or sells to induce the follower to acquire a larger block and thus spend more resources to improve firm value. Key is that the activists have correlated private information—initial blocks, firms' fundamentals, or their own productivity—so that prices either overreact or underreact to order ...
Journal Article
Hedge funds and investor protection regulation
A recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ruling requiring hedge fund advisers to register with the SEC aims to foster conduct and compliance to better protect hedge fund investors. This article focuses on investor protection regulation, considering its goals and likely costs and benefits. After reviewing some alternative regulatory approaches, the author examines the current U.S. regulatory structure for hedge funds, which has, perhaps unwittingly, separated hedge fund investors into two distinct classes -- retail and wholesale -- defined by wealth levels. ; The SEC's recent ruling ...
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 ...
Working Paper
Liquidity risk and hedge fund ownership
Using a unique, hand-collected data set of hedge fund ownership, we examine the effects of hedge fund ownership on liquidity risk in the cross-section of stocks. After controlling for institutional preferences for stock characteristics, we find that stocks held by hedge funds as marginal investors are more sensitive to changes in aggregate liquidity than comparable stocks held by other types of institutions or by individuals. Stocks held by hedge funds also experience significantly negative abnormal returns during liquidity crises. These findings support the theory of Brunnermeier and ...
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 ...
Working Paper
Only Winners in Tough Times Repeat: Hedge Fund Performance Persistence over Different Market Conditions
We provide novel evidence that hedge fund performance is persistent following weak hedge fund markets, but is not persistent following strong markets. Specifically, we construct two performance measures, DownsideReturns and UpsideReturns, conditioned on the level of overall hedge fund sector returns. After adjusting for risks, funds in the highest DownsideReturns quintile outperform funds in the lowest quintile by about 7% in the subsequent year, whereas funds with better UpsideReturns do not outperform subsequently. The DownsideReturns can predict future fund performance over a horizon as ...