Business 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 …

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.

Three Essays On Hedge Funds, Liping Qiu

Doctoral Dissertations

In Essay 1, we find that, on average, hedge funds decrease leverage prior to the beginning of the financial crisis, with leverage remaining below the pre-crisis levels. We also find that younger funds with lower current leverage and stricter fund governance are more likely to increase leverage following favorable performance; funds exposed to higher risk, higher management fee and higher current leverage tend to delever. Managers increase leverage in order to enhance future performance following superior returns only to be disappointed. We find mixed evidence on the performance difference between levered and unlevered funds, but levered funds do survive longer. …

Us Real Estate Investment Performance: 1983-2012, John F. Kerrigan

Honors Theses and Capstones

This study provides an overview of real estate investment performance over a 1983-2012 time period. The results show that although equity REITs outperformed all other assets on average annual return, on a risk-adjusted basis both private retail and apartment real estate outperformed all other assets. The study also found a recent trend in increased correlation between common stocks and REITs.

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 …

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.

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, …

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 …