Working Papers

The Allocative Role of Prime Brokers (paper link)

• Job Market Paper

This is the first paper to investigate and quantify how prime brokers help connect investors with hedge funds. I analyze the impact of the prime broker channel on fund flows and performance. I find that, among hedge funds that share a prime broker, top performing funds enjoy 15.43 percentage points higher fund flows over the next year. This result controls for overall performance and demonstrates that the prime broker channel is important for fund flows. In addition, hedge funds that receive the largest flows tend to subsequently underperform by 3.05 percentage points. This result is stronger for hedge funds that pay higher fees to prime brokers. Overall, my results suggest that prime brokers act as gatekeepers for less-sophisticated investors and actively affect capital allocation in the hedge fund market.

Who Responds to Hedge Fund Advertising? Institutional or Individual Investors? (with N. Mojir and K. Sudhir)

This paper explores recent changes in hedge fund advertising regulations by measuring relative importance of advertising for institutional/individual investors. The ban on advertising in the hedge fund industry, going back to the Securities Act of 1933, was recently lifted as part of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (i.e. the JOBS Act) of 2012. While opponents of the JOBS Act argue that poor-performing hedge funds would take advantage of it by targeting less-sophisticated individual investors, its proponents argue that it would put better hedge funds on the radar of large institutional investors and improve the allocation of funds in the market as a whole. To assess these arguments, we combine data on performance of hedge funds from Lipper TASS data base with data on hedge fund clientele base and investment positions from SEC forms ADV and 13F. Taking advantage of the fact that the JOBS Act affects only US-based investors, we use a difference-in-difference strategy to answer the following questions: Does allowing hedge funds to advertise result in increased share of individual investors? Is the increase in share of individual investors more towards hedge funds with lower alpha (i.e. risk-adjusted excess return) that take higher systematic risk? Has the market share for hedge funds with better performance increased after the JOBS Act?

Rehypothecation and the Pledgeability of Collateral (draft available upon request)

In this paper, I demonstrate that rehypothecation — the act of reusing collateral — can increase the pledgeability of collateral. In a standard collateralized loan, the lender faces the joint risk that the borrower will default and the pledged collateral will fail. If the pledged collateral itself has been rehypothecated, then a third-party (the ultimate borrower) is obligated to make a payment when the collateral fails. This third-party payment can reduce the risk the lender faces, and increase the pledgeability of the collateral. This feature of rehypothecation can help explain why risky subprime securities were used as collateral in money markets before the Financial Crisis of 2007-2009.

Works in Progress

Hedge Fund Media Exposure: Third-Party Marketers as Gatekeepers

I find evidence that third-party marketing firms manage media exposure for their hedge fund clients. I build a panel dataset of hedge fund news articles from the Wall Street Journal, and find that, in general, news articles are negatively related to future fund flows. This implies that the media tends to cover bad news about hedge funds. However, the results reverse for funds that have a third-party marketer. News about these funds is positively related to future fund flows. Taken together, these results imply that third-party marketers act as gatekeepers for media exposure.