Business Commons^™

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 …