Strategic behavior within families of hedge funds

The paper investigates the strategic behavior of hedge fund families. It focuses on decisions to start and liquidate family-member funds. Hedge fund families tend to liquidate funds that underperform compared to other member funds, and to replace them by new ones. By choosing a launch time after a short period of superior performance by their member funds, families extend the spillover to new funds. Hedge fund families seem to be more experienced in promoting their funds and attracting fund inflow than in generating superior performance. This results in higher dollar compensation earned by managers within multi-fund families than in stand-alone funds

Recovering Delisting Returns of Hedge Funds

Numerous hedge funds stop reporting to commercial databases each year. An issue for hedgefund performance estimation is: what delisting return to attribute to such funds? This would be particularly problematic if delisting returns are typically very different from continuing funds’ returns. In this paper, we use estimated portfolio holdings for funds-of-funds with reported returns to back out maximum likelihood estimates for hedge-fund delisting returns. The estimated mean delisting return for all exiting funds is small, although statistically significantly different from the average observed returns for all reporting hedge funds. These findings are robust to relaxing several underlying assumptions.

Improved Portfolio Choice using Second-Order Stochastic Dominance

We examine the use of second-order stochastic dominance as both a way to measure performance and also as a technique for constructing portfolios. Using in-sample data, we construct portfolios such that their second-order stochastic dominance over a typical pension fund benchmark is most probable. The empirical results based on 21 years of daily data suggest that this portfolio choice technique significantly outperforms the benchmark portfolio out-of-sample. As a preference-free technique it will also suit any risk-averse investor in e.g. a pension fund. Moreover, its out-of-sample performance across eight different measures is superior to widely discussed portfolio choice approaches such as equal weights, mean variance, and minimum-variance methods.second-order stochastic dominance, portfolio choice, portfolio measurement

Recovering Delisting Returns of Hedge Funds

Numerous hedge funds stop reporting to commercial databases each year. An issue for hedgefund performance estimation is: what delisting return to attribute to such funds? This would be particularly problematic if delisting returns are typically very different from continuing funds’ returns. In this paper, we use estimated portfolio holdings for funds-of-funds with reported returns to back out maximum likelihood estimates for hedge-fund delisting returns. The estimated mean delisting return for all exiting funds is small, although statistically significantly different from the average observed returns for all reporting hedge funds. These findings are robust to relaxing several underlying assumptions.Hedge Funds

Too Big to Care, Too Small to Matter: Macrofinancial Policy and Bank Liquidity Creation

We estimate the volume of liquidity creation by U.S. bank holding companies between 1997 and 2015, and examine the impact of changes in macrofinancial policies on the dynamics of this process. We focus on three major policy developments occurring in the aftermath of the 2007-2009 financial crisis: bank capital regulation reform, monetary stimulus through quantitative easing, and the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The dynamics of bank liquidity creation differ considerably between small and large institutions. The level of bank capital requirements and the stance of monetary policy affect the liquidity creation of small and medium-sized banks, but not the largest institutions which control over 80% of the banking system’s assets. In contrast, TARP has only short-term effects on small and medium banks, and leads to a long-term decline in liquidity provision per dollar of assets of the largest banks

When Paid Work Gives in to Unpaid Care Work: Evidence from the Hedge Fund Industry under COVID-19

We examine how childcare inequalities in the home affect the work productivity of female talent, using unique data on the family structures of hedge fund managers and the exogenous shock from school closures during the early COVID-19 pandemic response. We find that female managers’ ability to generate abnormal returns is curbed by 9% on average in the shock-month of school closures, providing a direct measure of the cost of unpaid care work. This effect is driven by mothers and especially mothers with young children. With increasing calls for more female representation in all layers of the economy and the efforts exerted toward that goal, there is reason for concern that these efforts might not factor in as the pandemic has uncovered how women in general and mothers in particular bear both the burden of unpaid care work and the subsequent cost to their paid work

Enhancing Betting Against Beta with Stochastic Dominance

The performance of the widely used betting-against-beta (BAB) investment strategy is improved by controlling for the stochastic dominance (SD) relation between individual stocks and the market portfolio. Dominating stocks, preferred by all risk-averse and prudent investors, are excluded from the short leg of the BAB strategy. Stocks that are dominated by the market are excluded from the long leg of the strategy. This prefiltering significantly enhances a wide range of performance and risk measures including abnormal returns relative to various factor models. The improvements are especially pronounced for the third-order SD, are robust to transaction costs and different market conditions