The voluntary nature of hedge fund database reporting creates strategic listing opportunities for hedge funds. However, little is known about how managers list funds across multiple databases or whether investors are fooled by funds’ listing decisions. In this paper, we find that hedge funds strategically list their small, best-performing funds in multiple outlets immediately while preserving the option to list their other funds in additional databases later. We generally find that investors react rationally to these fund listings based on the predictability of performance. Finally, our results lead to specific guidelines on handling backfilled returns to minimize biases.

We examine the incidence of operational losses among U.S. financial institutions using publicly reported loss data from 1980 to 2005. We show that most operational losses can be traced to a breakdown of internal control, and that firms suffering from these losses tend to be younger and more complex, and have higher credit risk, more antitakeover provisions, and chief executive officers (CEOs) with higher stock option holdings and bonuses relative to salary. These findings highlight the correlation between operational risk and credit risk, as well as the role of corporate governance and proper managerial incentives in mitigating operational risk.

Recent research shows that emerging markets are distinguished by high returns and low covariances with global market factors. To check whether these results can be attributed to their recent emergence, we simulate a simple, general model of global markets with a realistic survival process. The simulations reveal a number of new effects. We find that pre-emergence returns are systematically lower than post-emergence returns, and that the brevity of a market history is related to the bias in returns as well as to the world beta. These patterns are confirmed by an empirical analysis of emerging and submerged markets.

This paper examines the pricing of exchange rate risk in the U.S. stock market, using two factor and multi-factor arbitrage pricing models. Evidence is presented that the relation between stock returns and the value of the dollar differs systematically across industries. The empirical results, however, do not suggest that exchange risk is priced in the stock market. The unconditional risk premium attached to foreign currency exposure appears to be small and never significant. As a result, active hedging policies by financial managers cannot affect the cost of capital, and other reasons must explain why firms decide to hedge.

In portfolio analysis, uncertainty about parameter values leads to suboptimal portfolio choices. The resulting loss in the investor's utility is a function of the particular estimator chosen for expected returns. So, this is a problem of simultaneous estimation of normal means under a well-specified loss function. In this situation, as Stein has shown, the classical sample mean is inadmissible. This paper presents a simple empirical Bayes estimator that should outperform the sample mean in the context of a portfolio. Simulation analysis shows that these Bayes-Stein estimators provide significant gains in portfolio selection problems.