Herd behaviour in buyout investments

In this study, we explored the presence of correlated investment choices (i.e., herd behaviour) among international buyout funds by distinguishing among the contemporaneous and the following herding of smaller funds towards the top market players (i.e., the top quartile in terms of the fund size). In our analyses, we found that the industry herding towards the largest ones is common in private equity (PE) but mostly during market contractions or the deterioration of general market conditions. Moreover, we also found that as capital inflows into the PE industry slow down, herding occurs more often. This finding is consistent with the increasing competition for new capital fundraising in downturns, which can induce PE funds to herd more. We also found that both types of herding generate higher fund returns and lower risk for funds that are capable of herding. Additionally, we documented the persistence in herding.     

美国银行“被瘦身”

随着新的关于另类资产监管条款的出台,面对严苛的政策法规,美国各个银行不得不开始新一轮的"瘦身"潮。     

How persistent is private equity performance? Evidence from deal-level data

The persistence of returns is a critical issue for investors in their choice of private equity managers. In this paper, we analyse buyout performance persistence in new ways, using a unique database containing cash flow data on 13,523 portfolio company investments by 865 buyout funds. We focus on unique realized deals and find that persistence of fund managers has substantially declined as the private equity sector has matured and become more competitive. Private equity has, therefore, largely conformed to the pattern found in most other asset classes in which past performance is a poor predictor of the future.     

On the concentration of mutual fund portfolio holdings: Evidence from Taiwan

This paper tests the alternative hypotheses of investment selection skills versus overconfidence of equity mutual funds managers in Taiwan. We find that fund holdings’ concentration levels are high and positively related to funds’ risk-adjusted returns in tranquil market periods; however, the concentration levels are low and more negatively related to risk-adjusted returns in turmoil market periods. The time varying concentration-performance relation is not driven by fund size. Our finding implies that fund managers have superior investment selection skills when the market is less volatile, but they exhibit overconfidence when the market is in turmoil, suggesting an investment strategy of shifting from concentrated funds to more broadly diversified funds when market condition becomes worse.     

Mutual fund flows and investor returns: An empirical examination of fund investor timing ability

We examine the timing ability of mutual fund investors using cash flow data at the individual fund level. Over 1991–2004 equity fund investor timing decisions reduce fund investor average returns by 1.56% annually. Underperformance due to poor timing is greater in load funds and funds with relatively large risk-adjusted returns. In particular, the magnitude of investor underperformance due to poor timing largely offsets the risk-adjusted alpha gains offered by good-performing funds. Investors in both actively managed funds and index funds exhibit poor investment timing. We demonstrate that our empirical results are consistent with investor return-chasing behavior.     

Borrow Cheap,Buy High? The Determinants of Leverage and Pricing in Buyouts

Private equity funds pay particular attention to capital structure when executing leveraged buyouts, creating an interesting setting for examining capital structure theories. Using a large, international sample of buyouts from 1980 to 2008, we find that buyout leverage is unrelated to the cross‐sectional factors, suggested by traditional capital structure theories, that drive public firm leverage. Instead, variation in economy‐wide credit conditions is the main determinant of leverage in buyouts. Higher deal leverage is associated with higher transaction prices and lower buyout fund returns, suggesting that acquirers overpay when access to credit is easier.     

Pricing credit default swaps with bilateral value adjustments

The aim of this work is to examine the influence of mutual fund flows on market timing models, thus providing unbiased timing coefficients. However, as this control is motivated by the existing relationship between mutual fund flows and market returns, we first analyse this relationship, considering previous and concurrent market returns. However, unlike existing studies, we do not consider future returns, since investors do not observe them when making investment decisions. Thus, we feel it is more appropriate to consider expected market returns. We construct the expected market returns by running an AR model and considering the available public information about the macro-economy. The relationship is analysed under different conditions, considering a variety of different mutual fund flow measures, and considering (or not) the sensitivity of mutual fund flows to positive and negative market returns. We also propose different controls for the traditional timing models, and we further analyse the reverse-causality problem. The study demonstrates, for a sample of equity mutual funds registered for sale in the USA, that the poor market timing performance found in this and other prior studies can be completely attributed to the perverse effect of the fund managers’ liquidity service.     

Is it the Law or the Lawyers? Investment Covenants around the World*

This paper introduces a new dataset from 50 private investment funds from 17 countries around the world. We analyse the frequency of use of investment covenants imposed by institutional investors governing the activities of private investment fund managers in areas pertaining to investment decisions, investment powers, types of investments, fund operations and limitations on liability. While the data indicate a role for country legality in affecting the frequency of use of fund covenants, the data further indicate that the presence of legally trained managers has a more pronounced role in affecting the use of covenants. As private equity and venture capital investment increases across Europe and elsewhere, our results indicate that legal practice factors will matter more than the legal setting for the establishment of covenants governing new funds.     

Emerging Market Exposures and the Predictability of Hedge Fund Returns

We examine emerging market and global macro hedge funds and find a significant positive relation between hedge funds’ future returns and their exposure to both emerging market equities and emerging market currencies. We present evidence that the strong predictive power of emerging market betas is related to the superior market‐timing ability of these fund managers. Results are robust after controlling for commonly used hedge fund factors, the emerging market equity index, lagged fund returns, liquidity risk, and fund characteristics. Our results suggest that hedge funds can earn positive excess returns by timing their exposure to emerging market securities.     

Scale economies in pension fund investments: A dissection of investment costs across asset classes

Using a unique dataset of 225 Dutch occupational pension funds with a total of 928 billion euro of assets under management, we provide a comprehensive cross-sectional analysis of the relation between investment costs and pension fund size. Our dataset is free from self-reporting biases and decomposes investment costs for 6 asset classes in management costs and performance fees. We find that a pension fund that has 10 times more assets under management on average reports 7.67 basis points lower annual investment costs. Economies of scale differ per asset class. We find significant economies of scale in fixed income, equity and commodity portfolios, but not in real estate investments, private equity and hedge funds. We also find that large pension funds pay significantly higher performance fees for equity, private equity and hedge fund investments.     

Performance differentiation: cutting losses and maximizing profits of private equity and venture capital investments

Recent research has pointed out the need to differentiate between good versus poor performance of venture capital and private equity investments and to analyze the factors that determine the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of a fund. This study examines the different contractual and behavioral characteristics and their influence on the positive and negative performances of private equity investments. Specifically, we analyze how fund managers apply tools and investment behavior to mitigate risks and maximize returns. The empirical investigation of these questions is based on a merged dataset, which combines the Venture Economics and CEPRES databases. It includes a total of 1,011 investments made by 137 different funds that belong to 54 private equity and venture capital firms worldwide over the period from 1979 to 2003. Our results confirm that the reduction of losses and the maximization of investment profits have different antecedents. Although losses are minimized by the use of convertibles and by increasing the venture capital firms’ accumulated experience, profits are increased by the potential of the fund’s management to allocate resources to portfolio companies. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the determinants of venture capital and private equity returns by differentiating between the mitigation of risks and the maximization of profits.      

Rewarding risk-taking or skill? The case of private equity fund managers

We examine whether typical private equity fund compensation contracts reward excessive risk-taking rather than managerial skill. Our analysis is based on a novel model of investment value, cash flows, and fee dynamics of private equity funds. Given the embedded option-like fee components, our results demonstrate that fund managers indeed have an incentive for excessive risk-taking when only fee income from the current fund is considered. However, when managers also consider potential compensation from follow-on funds, their risk-taking incentives depend on their individual skill levels, and skilled managers will have an incentive to reduce fund risk. We also show that managers must generate substantial abnormal returns in order to compensate investors for the given fee components.     

Drivers of holding period firm-level returns in private equity-backed buyouts

We extend the research on the drivers of holding period firm-level returns in private equity (PE)-backed buyouts by examining deal-, industry-, and macroeconomic-level drivers and their interaction. To conduct our study, we use a comprehensive and hand-collected dataset covering exited buyouts in the UK between 1995–2004, and we control for sample selection and investment risk. Our study shows that governance variables generally have a limited role in driving value creation but that use of a ratchet is positively related to both equity and enterprise value returns; we also find that leverage has a positive impact on median and top-quartile equity returns. Moreover, returns are driven by the size of the buyout and the acquisitions made during the holding period. With respect to macroeconomic and industry level factors, industry growth particularly drives buyout returns. However, the effect of industry growth is not uniform; its influence is particularly strong in insider-driven and divisional buyouts, in addition to top-quartile transactions.     

Why Are Buyouts Levered? The Financial Structure of Private Equity Funds

Private equity funds are important to the economy, yet there is little analysis explaining their financial structure. In our model the financial structure minimizes agency conflicts between fund managers and investors. Relative to financing each deal separately, raising a fund where the manager receives a fraction of aggregate excess returns reduces incentives to make bad investments. Efficiency is further improved by requiring funds to also use deal-by-deal debt financing, which becomes unavailable in states where internal discipline fails. Private equity investment becomes highly sensitive to aggregate credit conditions and investments in bad states outperform investments in good states.     

The impact of the Arab Spring and the Ebola outbreak on African equity mutual fund investor decisions

Financial development and stock markets have been widely considered to be key factors in economic growth. Among institutional investors, mutual funds play a key role in providing financial resources to stock markets, particularly in developing countries. Different from other investments, mutual fund flows could be affected by retail investors’ behavior and their overreaction to specific events. We considered 78 equity mutual funds that are geographically specialized in African countries and observed monthly flows and performance for the period of 2006–2015. We find that two major events, Ebola and the Arab Spring, significantly affected the fund flows, controlling for fund performance, expenses and market returns. Retail investors over-reacted to these major events, withdrawing their savings from the African mutual funds. This result is particularly strong when connected to the media coverage of these events: the higher the number of articles about Arab Spring and Ebola, the higher the withdrawals. These irrational investors’ behavior damaged the funds’ managers market timing ability, and reduced the equity capital injection into African stock markets. Our results have several implications for both holders of frontier market mutual funds and the overall asset management industry.     

Who incentivizes the mutual fund manager,new or old shareholders?

This study tests whether mutual fund shareholders continue to trade in response to fund returns after they make their initial investment in fund shares. It decomposes the relationship between fund returns and shareholder flow in a large, proprietary panel of all shareholder transactions in one midsize no-load mutual fund family. Results show that both new and old shareholders buy shares during periods of good returns; however, shareholder outflow is essentially unrelated to fund returns. This lack of a return-sell relationship is not driven by locked-in pension assets, shareholders’ ignorance of ongoing fund returns, or embedded capital gains. However, there is evidence that exchanges between equity funds in the family are related more strongly to returns of the destination fund than to returns of the origination fund. This may indicate that flow between equity mutual funds is driven by shareholders buying new funds rather than selling old funds. Supermarket shareholders are smart insofar as they exchange into funds that subsequently outperform their prior funds during their individual holding periods.     

The bright and dark side of staging: Investment performance and the varying motivations of private equity firms

Previous papers that examined investment decisions by private equity funds are divided on whether staging has a positive or negative effect on returns. We believe these opposing views can be reconciled by studying when staging is used during the life of the investment relationship: We find that staging has a positive effect on investment returns in the beginning of the investment relationship, consistent with the notion that staging helps mitigate information asymmetry. However, staging appears to be negatively associated with returns when used prior to the exit decision. Our unique dataset allows us to measure these intertemporal effects precisely.     

The Performance,Asset Allocation,and Investment Style of International Equity Managers

This paper evaluates the performance of 114 international equity managers over the January 1988–December 1997 period. Performance tests are conducted using Sharpe (1966) and Jensen (1968) performance methodologies. The managers are divided into mutual fund (n=54) and separately managed fund (n=60) investment management categories. Each management category is further divided by foreign and world (global) investment objectives. Three major findings are reported. First, international equity managers, on average, were unable to outperform the MSCI World market proxy during the sample period. However, world managers did perform better than their foreign counterparts. Second, geographic asset allocation and equity style allocation decisions enhanced the performance of international managers during the sample period. Third, separately managed funds outperformed mutual funds during the period studied when mutual fund returns are measured net of management fees. The apparent managed performance advantage abates, however, when mutual fund returns are adjusted to include management fees. Thus, we find no significant difference in the performance of the management categories when returns are measured gross of fees.     

What Drives Private Equity Returns?– Fund Inflows,Skilled GPs,and/or Risk?*

This paper analyzes the determinants of returns generated by mature European private equity funds. It starts from the presumption that this asset class is characterized by illiquidity, stickiness, and segmentation. Given this presumption, Gompers and Lerner (2000) have shown that venture deal valuations are driven by overall fund inflows into the industry that yield the putative ‘money chasing deals’ phenomenon. It is the aim of this paper to show that this phenomenon explains a significant part of the variation in private equity funds' returns. This is especially true for venture funds, as they are affected more by illiquidity and segmentation than buy‐out funds. In the context of a WLS‐regression approach the paper reports a highly significant impact of total fund inflows on fund returns. It can also be shown that private equity funds' returns are driven by GP's skills as well as stand‐alone investment risk. In a bootstrapping context we can show that most of these results are quite stable.     

境内外私募股权基金比较研究

在亚洲等新型市场国家,私募股权基金投资并帮助那些优质的公司进一步拓展发展空间,并提供就业机会,引入先进的财务管理经验,且为其投资者提供高额回报,进而促进经济的发展,这使得亚洲尤其是中国地区的私募股权投资得到大幅度发展。本文的研究正是基于全球私募股权市场热火朝天的发展和我国私募股权交易数额呈级数增长的背景下进行。