Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Diverse Hedge Funds, Yan Lu, Narayan Y. Naik, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Hedge fund teams with heterogeneous educational backgrounds, academic specializations, work experiences, genders, and races, outperform homogeneous teams after adjusting for risk and fund characteristics. An event study of manager team transitions, instrumental variable regressions, and an analysis of managers who simultaneously operate solo- and team-managed funds address endogeneity concerns. Diverse teams deliver superior returns by arbitraging more stock anomalies, avoiding behavioral biases, and minimizing downside risks. Moreover, diversity allows hedge funds to circumvent capacity constraints and generate persistent performance. Our results suggest that diversity adds value in asset management. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the …

Feeling The Heat? Fear Of Failure And Performance, Alberto Chong, Marco Chong

CSLF Working Papers

Using a new, objective measure, we study the role of fear of failure in performance and find that it is positively linked with the latter, a finding that tends to contradict the conventional wisdom in both psychology and behavioral economics. We use individual data from the nationally syndicated television show MasterChef for the years 2010 to 2020 and exploit situations in which contestants are on the verge of being dropped from competition. Using ordinary least squares, we show that extreme fear of failure is associated with an increase of two to four positions in the final placement of the competition.

Investing In Low-Trust Countries: On The Role Of Social Trust In The Global Mutual Fund Industry, Massimo Massa, Chengwei Wang, Hong Zhang, Jian Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We hypothesize that social trust, in mitigating contracting incompleteness, may have an important effect on the activeness and effectiveness of delegated portfolio management. Using a complete sample of worldwide open-end mutual funds, we find that trust is positively associated with the activeness of funds and that trust-related active share delivers superior performance (e.g., approximately 2% per year for cross-border investments). Moreover, "trust in the market" and "trust in managers" play important yet different roles for different types of cross-border delegated portfolio management. Our results suggest that trust acts as a fundamental building block for delegated portfolio management.

Happy Analysts, Ole-Kristian Hope, Congcong Li, An-Ping Lin, Maryjane Rabier

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This paper is the first to investigate the role of work-life balance in financial analysts' performance and career advancement. Using a large sample of Glassdoor reviews by financial analysts, we find a significant non-linear relation between perceived work-life balance and analyst performance and analyst career advancement. Specifically, when perceived work-life balance is relatively low, an increase in work-life balance is associated with better analyst performance and career advancement; however, when perceived work-life balance is already high, a further increase in work-life balance is associated with worse analyst performance and career advancement.

Happy Analysts, Ole-Kristian Hope, Congcong Li, An-Ping Lin, Maryjane Rabier

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This paper is the first to investigate the role of work-life balance in financial analysts’ performance and career advancement. Using a large sample of Glassdoor reviews by financial analysts, we find a significant non-linear relation between work-life balance satisfaction and analyst performance and analyst career advancement. Specifically, when work-life balance satisfaction is relatively low, an increase in work-life balance is associated with better analyst performance and career advancement; however, when perceived work-life balance is already high, a further increase in work-life balance is associated with worse analyst performance and career advancement.

Desarrollo Del Capital Humano Y Su Impacto En El Desempeño De Una Institución Microfinanciera No Regulada Del Perú, Sylvia Gonzalez, Santos Guerrero, Alfredo Matos Chamorro, Edelmira Picon Ventocilla

Faculty Publications

This study analyzes the relationship between the promoters of human capital and performance of an unregulated microfinance institution (IMNR) in Peru in 2009. A cross-sectional study was conducted using the survey Human Capital Management (HCM, for its acronym in English ) by Bassi and McMurrer (2007) for the Community Banks program of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) ADRA Peru's workers. The results of a multiple linear regression analysis showed that the motivators of practices of leadership and learning ability are related to operational sustainability and productivity of credit execution. The variable “Leadership practices” consists of five factors: communication, inclusion, supervisory skills, …

A Regression Model To Investigate The Performance Of Black-Scholes Using Macroeconomic Predictors, Timothy A. Smith, Ersoy Subasi, Aliraza M. Rattansi

Publications

As it is well known an option is defined as the right to buy sell a certain asset, thus, one can look at the purchase of an option as a bet on the financial instrument under consideration. Now while the evaluation of options is a completely different mathematical topic than the prediction of future stock prices, there is some relationship between the two. It is worthy to note that henceforth we will only consider options that have a given fixed expiration time T, i.e., we restrict the discussion to the so called European options. Now, for a simple illustration of …

Why Do Retail Investors Make Costly Mistakes? An Experiment On Mutual Fund Choice, Jill E. Fisch, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

All Faculty Scholarship

There is mounting evidence that retail investors make predictable, costly investment mistakes, including underinvestment, naïve diversification, and payment of excessive fund fees. Over the past thirty-five years, however, participant-directed 401(k) plans have largely replaced professionally managed pension plans, requiring unsophisticated retail investors to navigate the financial markets themselves. Policy-makers have struggled with regulatory interventions designed to improve the quality of investment decisions without a clear understanding of the reasons for investor mistakes. Absent such an understanding, it is difficult to design effective regulatory responses.

This article offers a first step in understanding the investor decision-making process. We use an internet-based …

Hedge Fund Managers Who Eschew Asset Gathering, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

Fund managers may eschew financial rewards for the non-pecuniary benefits from investment management. They may be highly focused on leaving a legacy of stellar returns when they retire and prefer to preserve their ability to generate those returns by staying small. Others may prefer to run small firms so as to devote more of their time and energy into investment activities as opposed to managing people. We empirically zero in on such managers by focusing on funds that have delivered superior returns but do not take advantage of their stellar performance track records to grow capital aggressively. We find that …

The Performance Of Listed Hedge Fund Firms, Lin Sun, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

We examine the impact of fund management company listing on hedge fund performance. We find that hedge funds managed by listed firms underperform those managed by unlisted firms by 1.89 per annum after adjusting for risk. Using an event study framework, we show that hedge fund performance deteriorates from 10.32 percent per year in the 36-month pre-listing window to 2.16 percent per year in the 36-month post-listing window. Over the same period, firm assets under management effectively double from US$1.54bn to US$3.04bn. There is no evidence to suggest that funds managed by listed firms are better able to manage operational …

Hedging Effectiveness Under Conditions Of Asymmetry, Jim Hanly, John Cotter

Articles

We examine whether hedging effectiveness is affected by asymmetry in the return distribution by applying tail specific metrics, for example, Value at Risk, to compare the hedging effectiveness of short and long hedgers. Comparisons are applied to a number of hedging strategies including OLS, and both symmetric and asymmetric GARCH models. We apply our analysis to a dataset consisting of S&P500 index cash and futures containing symmetric and asymmetric return distributions chosen ex-post. Our findings show that asymmetry reduces out-of-sample hedging performance and that significant differences occur in hedging performance between short and long hedgers.

Flagship Funds At Hedge Fund Families, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

Motivated by the stellar performance of flagship funds such as the Renaissance Medallion fund, we ask whether hedge fund firms (e.g. Renaissance Technologies) have incentives to protect the performance of their flagship funds (e.g. Medallion). We find that the flagship fund tends to outperform other funds within the fund family. The fees and redemption terms of non-flagship funds at launch is correlated with the past performance of the flagship fund. Finally, flagship fund performance has a positive impact on net flows into the other funds within the same family.

Quantitative Hedge Fund Selection (Part 2), Melvyn Teo

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

Do fund incentives, volatility exposure, and liquidity risk affect fund performance? We show that hedge funds with high performance fees and high water mark provisions tend to outperform those with low performance fees and no high water marks. Moreover, funds that short volatility and embrace liquidity risk deliver significantly higher returns relative to funds that long volatility and eschew liquidity risk. Investors with access to secure capital and managed account platforms may be positioned to take advantage of these performance differences.

The Geography Of Hedge Funds, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

This article analyzes the relationship between the risk-adjusted performance of hedge funds and their proximity to investments using data on Asian-focused hedge funds. We find, relative to an augmented Fung and Hsieh (2004) factor model, that hedge funds with a physical presence (head or research office) in their investment region outperform other hedge funds by 3.72 percent per year. The local information advantage is pervasive across all major geographical regions, but is strongest for Emerging Market funds and funds holding illiquid securities. These results are robust to adjustments for fund fees, serial correlation, backfill bias, and incubation bias. We show …

Do Hedge Funds Deliver Alpha? A Bayesian And Bootstrap Analysis, Robert Kosowski, Narayan Y. Naik, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

Using a robust bootstrap procedure, we find that top hedge fund performance cannot be explained by luck, and that hedge fund performance persists at annual horizons. Moreover, we show that Bayesian measures, which help overcome the short-sample problem inherent in hedge fund returns, lead to superior performance predictability. Relative to sorting on OLS alphas, sorting on Bayesian alphas yields a 5.5 percent per year increase in the alpha of the spread between the top and bottom hedge fund deciles. Our results are robust, and relevant to investors, as they are neither confined to small funds, nor driven by incubation bias, …

How Unilever Hpc-Na Sold Its Employees On The Balanced Scorecard, Bridget Lyons, Andra Gumbus

WCBT Faculty Publications

Unilever Home & Personal Care-North America (HPC-NA) not only takes marketing its products very seriously, but it heavily promotes its balanced scorecard to employees as well. No wonder Unilever HPC-NA successfully designed a unique strategy to communicate awareness of the BSC while encouraging its participation and use. Their experiences should prove valuable to other organizations implementing a balanced scorecard and to those just beginning to formulate a communications approach to internal stakeholders about its role, significance, and use. The Unilever HPC-NA marketing campaign provides an effective strategy that other firms may consider when marketing a balanced scorecard internally. The HPC-NA …

Credit History And The Performance Of Prime And Nonprime Mortgages, Anthony Pennington-Cross

Finance Faculty Research and Publications

Although nonprime lending has experienced steady or even explosive growth over the last decade very little is known about the performance characteristics of these mortgages. Using data from national secondary market institutions, this paper estimates a competing risks proportional hazard model, which includes unobserved heterogeneity. The analysis examines the performance of 30-year fixed rate owner occupied home purchase mortgages from February 1995 to the end of 1999 and compares nonprime and prime loan default and prepayment behavior. Nonprime loans are identified by mortgage interest rates that are substantially higher than the prevailing prime rate. Results indicate that nonprime mortgages differ …

Persistence In Style-Adjusted Mutual Fund Returns, Melvyn Teo, Sung-Jun Woo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The literature on mutual fund persistence took a hit with the finding that one-year stock momentum and expense ratios account for most of the persistence in mutual fund performance (Carhart, 1992; Carhart, 1997). However, since equity mutual funds are grouped into styles (e.g., large value, small growth, mid-cap growth, etc.) and are often confined to trading stocks within their style, one should measure fund performance relative to style when investigating managerial ability. Using CRSP mutual fund data and a methodology similar to Carhart (1997), we find that differences in style-adjusted fund returns persist for up to six years. Neither one-year …

Agenda: Western Water: Expanding Uses/Finite Supplies, University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center

Western Water: Expanding Uses/Finite Supplies (Summer Conference, June 2-4)

Conference organizers and/or faculty included University of Colorado School of Law professors James N. Corbridge, Jr., Lawrence J. MacDonnell and David H. Getches.

This conference featured luncheon talks by Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm and Undersecretary of the Department of the Interior Ann McLaughlin. The conference attracted 115 registrants from 19 states plus the District of Columbia.