Is There Hedge Fund Contagion?

We examine whether hedge funds experience contagion. First, we consider whether extreme movements in equity, fixed income, and currency markets are contagious to hedge funds. Second, we investigate whether extreme adverse returns in one hedge fund style are contagious to other hedge fund styles. To conduct this examination, we estimate binomial and multinomial logit models of contagion using daily returns on hedge fund style indices as well as monthly returns on indices with a longer history. Our main finding is that there is no evidence of contagion from equity, fixed income, and foreign exchange markets to hedge funds, except for weak evidence of contagion for one single daily hedge fund style index. By contrast, we find strong evidence of contagion across hedge fund styles, so that hedge fund styles tend to have poor coincident returns.

Hedge Fund Contagion and Liquidity

Using hedge fund indices representing eight different styles, we find strong evidence of contagion within the hedge fund sector: controlling for a number of risk factors, the average probability that a hedge fund style index has extreme poor performance (lower 10% tail) increases from 2% to 21% as the number of other hedge fund style indices with extreme poor performance increases from zero to seven. We investigate how changes in funding and asset liquidity intensify this contagion, and find that the likelihood of contagion is high when prime brokerage firms have poor performance (which would be expected to affect hedge fund funding liquidity adversely) and when stock market liquidity (a proxy for asset liquidity) is low. Finally, we examine whether extreme poor performance in the stock, bond, and currency markets is more likely when contagion in the hedge fund sector is high. We find no evidence that contagion in the hedge fund sector is associated with extreme poor performance in the stock and bond markets, but find significant evidence that performance in the currency market is worse when hedge fund contagion is high, consistent with the effects of an unwinding of carry trades.

The Greenspan Era: Discretion, Rather Than Rules

What stands out in retrospect about U.S. monetary policy during the Greenspan Era is the ongoing movement away from mechanistic restrictions on the conduct of policy, together with a willingness on occasion to depart even from what more flexible guidelines dictated by contemporary conventional wisdom would imply, in the interest of carrying out the Federal Reserve System%u2019s dual mandate to pursue both stable prices and maximum employment. Part of this change was procedural %u2013 for example, the elimination of money growth targets. The most substantive demonstration of policy flexibility came in the latter half of the 1990s, as unemployment fell below 6% (in 1994), then below 5% (in 1997), and then remained below 5% for more than four years, yet the Federal Reserve did not tighten monetary policy. This policy stance was consistent with a view of the economy, including faster productivity growth and increased exposure to international competition, that Chairman Greenspan had articulated nearly a decade before.

Shareholder Activism as a Corrective Mechanism in Corporate Governance

Under an Arrowian framework, centralized authority and management provides for optimal decision making in large organizations. However, Kenneth Arrow also recognized that other elements within the organization, beyond the central authority, occasionally may have superior information or decision-making skills. In such cases, such elements may act as a corrective mechanism within the organization. In the context of public companies, this Article finds that such a corrective mechanism comes in the form of hedge fund activism, or, more accurately, offensive shareholder activism. Offensive shareholder activism operates in the market for corporate influence, not control. Consistent with a theoretical framework that protects the value of centralized authority and a legal framework that rests fiduciary responsibility with the board, authority is not shifted to influential, yet unaccountable, shareholders. Governance entrepreneurs in the market for corporate influence must first identify those instances in which authority-sharing may result in value-enhancing policy decisions, and then persuade the board and/or other shareholders of the wisdom of their policies, before they will be permitted to share the authority necessary to implement the policy. Thus, boards often reward offensive shareholder activists that prove to have superior information and/or strategies by at least temporarily sharing authority with the activists by either providing them seats in the board or simply allowing them to directly influence corporate policy. This Article thus reframes the ongoing debate on the value of shareholder activism by showing how offensive shareholder activism can co-exist with—and indeed, is supported by—Kenneth Arrow’s theory of management centralization, which undergirds the traditional authority model of corporate governance. This Article also provides a much-needed bridge between the traditional authority model of corporate law and governance as utilized by Professors Steven Bainbridge and Michael Dooley and those who have done empirical studies on hedge fund activism, including Professor Lucian Bebchuk. This bridge helps to identify when shareholder activism may be a positive influence on corporate governance

Shareholder Activism as a Corrective Mechanism in Corporate Governance

Under an Arrowian framework, centralized authority and management provides for optimal decision making in large organizations. However, Kenneth Arrow also recognized that other elements within the organization, beyond the central authority, occasionally may have superior information or decision-making skills. In such cases, such elements may act as a corrective mechanism within the organization. In the context of public companies, this Article finds that such a corrective mechanism comes in the form of hedge fund activism, or, more accurately, offensive shareholder activism. Offensive shareholder activism operates in the market for corporate influence, not control. Consistent with a theoretical framework that protects the value of centralized authority and a legal framework that rests fiduciary responsibility with the board, authority is not shifted to influential, yet unaccountable, shareholders. Governance entrepreneurs in the market for corporate influence must first identify those instances in which authority-sharing may result in value-enhancing policy decisions, and then persuade the board and/or other shareholders of the wisdom of their policies, before they will be permitted to share the authority necessary to implement the policy. Thus, boards often reward offensive shareholder activists that prove to have superior information and/or strategies by at least temporarily sharing authority with the activists by either providing them seats in the board or simply allowing them to directly influence corporate policy. This Article thus reframes the ongoing debate on the value of shareholder activism by showing how offensive shareholder activism can co-exist with—and indeed, is supported by—Kenneth Arrow’s theory of management centralization, which undergirds the traditional authority model of corporate governance. This Article also provides a much-needed bridge between the traditional authority model of corporate law and governance as utilized by Professors Steven Bainbridge and Michael Dooley and those who have done empirical studies on hedge fund activism, including Professor Lucian Bebchuk. This bridge helps to identify when shareholder activism may be a positive influence on corporate governance

Hedge Fund Activism, Poison Pills, and the Jurisprudence of Threat

This chapter reviews the single high profile case in which twentieth century antitakeover law has come to bear on management defense against a twenty-first century activist challenge—the Delaware Court of Chancery’s decision to sustain a low-threshold poison pill deployed against an activist in Third Point LLC v. Ruprecht. The decision implicated an important policy question: whether a twentieth century doctrine keyed to hostile takeovers and control transfers appropriately can be brought to bear in a twenty-first century governance context in which the challenger eschews control transfer and instead makes aggressive use of the shareholder franchise. Resolution of the question entails evaluation of the gravity of two sets of threats, one at the doctrinal level and the other at the policy level. The doctrinal threats are exterior threats to corporate policy and effectiveness on which managers justify defensive tactics under Unocal v. Mesa Petroleum Co. Because some threats have greater justificatory salience under Unocal than do others, a question arises as to the nature and characterization of the threats allegedly held out by activist intervention. The policy threats implicate the new balance of power between managers and shareholders. The chapter appraises the threats. As regards Unocal, it demonstrates a serious problem of fit. The chapter goes on to conduct a thought experiment that reshapes and extends Unocal so that it does provide a robust basis for sustaining management defense against activist hedge funds, even shielding poison pills with 5 percent triggers. The extension amounts to radical reformulation of the conceptual framework of corporate law, thereby posing the policy threat. But the policy threat, on examination, proves uncompelling, today’s corporate managers being disinclined to traverse shareholder preferences by promulgating standing poison pills. Given that, the chapter asks whether 5 percent poison pills could hold out policy benefits in the form of company-by-company shareholder-manager engagement on the question of suitability for activist intervention

Dynamic Scoring: Alternative Financing Schemes

Neoclassical growth models predict that reductions in capital or labor tax rates are expansionary when lump-sum transfers are used to balance the government budget. This paper explores the consequences of bond-financed tax reductions that bring forth a range of possible offsetting policies, including future government consumption, capital tax rates, or labor tax rates. Through the resulting intertemporal distortions, current tax cuts can be contractionary. The paper also finds that more aggressive responses of offsetting policies to debt engender less debt accumulation and less costly tax cuts.

Hedge Fund Activism, Poison Pills, and the Jurisprudence of Threat

This chapter reviews the single high profile case in which twentieth century antitakeover law has come to bear on management defense against a twenty-first century activist challenge—the Delaware Court of Chancery’s decision to sustain a low-threshold poison pill deployed against an activist in Third Point LLC v. Ruprecht. The decision implicated an important policy question: whether a twentieth century doctrine keyed to hostile takeovers and control transfers appropriately can be brought to bear in a twenty-first century governance context in which the challenger eschews control transfer and instead makes aggressive use of the shareholder franchise. Resolution of the question entails evaluation of the gravity of two sets of threats, one at the doctrinal level and the other at the policy level. The doctrinal threats are exterior threats to corporate policy and effectiveness on which managers justify defensive tactics under Unocal v. Mesa Petroleum Co. Because some threats have greater justificatory salience under Unocal than do others, a question arises as to the nature and characterization of the threats allegedly held out by activist intervention. The policy threats implicate the new balance of power between managers and shareholders. The chapter appraises the threats. As regards Unocal, it demonstrates a serious problem of fit. The chapter goes on to conduct a thought experiment that reshapes and extends Unocal so that it does provide a robust basis for sustaining management defense against activist hedge funds, even shielding poison pills with 5 percent triggers. The extension amounts to radical reformulation of the conceptual framework of corporate law, thereby posing the policy threat. But the policy threat, on examination, proves uncompelling, today’s corporate managers being disinclined to traverse shareholder preferences by promulgating standing poison pills. Given that, the chapter asks whether 5 percent poison pills could hold out policy benefits in the form of company-by-company shareholder-manager engagement on the question of suitability for activist intervention

The Challenge of Hedge Fund Regulation

Currently en vogue concerns about hedge funds are not nearly as substantial as is often claimed. Moreover, the funds themselves are reducing their risks to investors and the broader markets, in accordance with investor demands. As hedge funds benefit the broader market by mitigating price downturns, bearing risks that others will not, making securities more liquid, and ferreting out inefficiencies, policymakers should consider whether stricter regulation of hedge funds could do more harm than good