Corporate control and shareholder activism in Germany: An empirical analysis of hedge fund strategies

Government-initiated reforms of the German financial system two decades ago shifted corporate control activities from universal banks to capital markets. Hedge funds took advantage of these changes by acquiring stakes in weakly governed firms. For 653 hedge fund interventions between 2000 and 2020, this study analyzes the changes in financial and operating performance and firm characteristics before and after the event. We also assess the probabilities that a firm becomes a target and that an attack creates shareholders value. On average, hedge funds increased returns, with the magnitude depending on the period, level of aggressiveness, institutional ownership, and industry. Crisis and non-crisis results differ, as hedge funds strategies are mostly successful in a rising stock market environment. Typically, hedge funds targeted smaller and more visible firms with higher sales growth, lower leverage, and higher institutional ownership. After the attack, firm profitability and cash holdings decreased, leverage increased, while investments in M&A and capex declined. This research offers new empirical evidence on the success of hedge fund strategies in Germany and on the performance of targeted firms.     

全球流动性过剩、对冲基金发展与中国金融稳定

全球流动性过剩导致全球金融资产激增,推动对冲基金业规模迅速膨胀,也使得对冲基金业在结构和投资动向上也出现了新的变化。对冲基金在全球寻找套利和投机机会,对全球的金融稳定产生一定的影响,在此背景下,中国需要审慎资本项目开放和加强对冲基金的监管。     

HEDGE FUNDS: WHAT DO WE KNOW?

Hedge funds are attracting increased attention because of their reputation for earning superior (risk-adjusted) returns. Hedge Fund Research Inc. estimates that in 2001 there were about 7,000 hedge funds with investor capital of about $600 billion. And yet the diversity of hedge funds, combined with a general lack of transparency, makes the hedge fund industry something of a "black box."
This article provides an overview of the legal structure of hedge funds, the various fund investment strategies, and the existing research on overall hedge fund performance. Without uniform and comprehensive reporting requirements, it is difficult to ascertain the size and scope of hedge fund investments. Nonetheless, current research provides persuasive evidence that hedge funds earn positive risk-adjusted returns, on average, in contrast to their counterparts in the mutual fund industry. In an attempt to explain these higher returns, the authors begin by noting that hedge funds are subject to considerably less regulation than other investment institutions because their client base is limited to wealthy individuals and institutions. Hedge funds can thus employ investment strategies that mutual funds and pension funds are prohibited from pursuing, such as short selling, high leverage, derivatives, concentrated holdings, and limited redemptions. As a result, the funds may be able to earn excess returns by operating in illiquid and specialized markets where there is a shortage of arbitrage capital. At the same time, and perhaps even more important, hedge funds are in a better position than conventional mutual funds to attract skilled managers because of their use of performance-based incentive fee structures.     

对冲基金及其监管问题研究

近年来,随着金融市场的加速创新和结构性调整,对冲基金的规模也迅速扩张,成为国际金融市场的重要参与者。与传统的资产管理、共同基金相比,对冲基金在投资策略、组织形式等方面具有自己的特点。对冲基金日益扩大的资产规模和自由灵活的投资策略增加了金融市场的流动性、提高了市场效率,但同时也给金融体系带来了新的不稳定因素。2006年以来,对冲基金对金融稳定的影响日益成为全球金融监管者关注的问题。有些国家主张通过间接监管的方式,有些则一直推动加强对对冲基金的直接监管。如何加强对对冲基金的监管,减少对冲基金对金融体系稳定性的负面影响,仍然是全球金融业面临的一项挑战。     

Hedge fund marketing in an era of regulatory scrutiny

Hedge fund marketing professionals must do a better job of educating the investment industry, regulators included, in an attempt to be sure their voice is heard accurately and loudly through effective thought leadership. When more people understand the role that hedge funds play in an investment portfolio, the cloud of mystery will continue to lift and hedge fund investors will be able to make their own judgment. Hedge fund managers, financial media, investor relations professionals, and others play a key role in this process. Concurrent with this marketing focus, however, the industry must comply with the new requirements of hedge fund regulation and other legal issues. Those who fail to pay heed to the regulators may find themselves in a perilous position.     

Measuring the market impact of hedge funds

Hedge funds often employ opportunistic trading strategies on a leveraged basis. It is natural to find their footprints in most major market events. A “small bet” by large hedge funds can be a sizeable transaction that can impact a market. This study estimates hedge fund exposures during a number of major market events. In some episodes, hedge funds had significant exposures and were in a position to exert substantial market impact. In other episodes, hedge fund exposures were insignificant, either in absolute terms or relative to other market participants. In all cases, we found no evidence of hedge funds using positive feedback trading strategies. There was also little evidence that hedge funds systematically caused market prices to deviate from economic fundamentals.     

Do hedge funds have enough capital? A value-at-risk approach

We examine the risk characteristics and capital adequacy of hedge funds through the Value-at-Risk approach. Using extensive data on nearly 1,500 hedge funds, we find only 3.7% live and 10.9% dead funds are undercapitalized as of March 2003. Moreover, the undercapitalized funds are relatively small and constitute a tiny fraction of total fund assets in our sample. Cross-sectionally, the variability in fund capitalization is related to size, investment style, age, and management fee. Hedge fund risk and capitalization also display significant time variation. Traditional risk measures like standard deviation or leverage ratios fail to detect these trends.     

Hedge Funds and Corporate Innovation

Using National Bureau of Economics Research patent data and hedge fund holdings in US firms from 1998 to 2006, we examine the effect of hedge fund ownership on corporate innovation. We find that hedge fund ownership increases both patent quantity and quality, even after controlling for endogeneity. Hedge funds appear to increase innovation and firm value by increasing research and development (R&D) productivity and innovation efficiency rather than R&D input. Our study suggests another channel through which hedge funds may enhance firm value, contributing to the literature on hedge fund ownership.     

Leverage-induced systemic risk under Basle II and other credit risk policies

We use a simple agent based model of value investors in financial markets to test three credit regulation policies. The first is the unregulated case, which only imposes limits on maximum leverage. The second is Basle II and the third is a hypothetical alternative in which banks perfectly hedge all of their leverage-induced risk with options. When compared to the unregulated case both Basle II and the perfect hedge policy reduce the risk of default when leverage is low but increase it when leverage is high. This is because both regulation policies increase the amount of synchronized buying and selling needed to achieve deleveraging, which can destabilize the market. None of these policies are optimal for everyone: risk neutral investors prefer the unregulated case with low maximum leverage, banks prefer the perfect hedge policy, and fund managers prefer the unregulated case with high maximum leverage. No one prefers Basle II.     

The Performance of Hedge Funds: Risk, Return, and Incentives

Hedge funds display several interesting characteristics that may influence performance, including: flexible investment strategies, strong managerial incentives, substantial managerial investment, sophisticated investors, and limited government oversight. Using a large sample of hedge fund data from 1988–1995, we find that hedge funds consistently outperform mutual funds, but not standard market indices. Hedge funds, however, are more volatile than both mutual funds and market indices. Incentive fees explain some of the higher performance, but not the increased total risk. The impact of six data-conditioning biases is explored. We find evidence that positive and negative survival-related biases offset each other.     

Hedge funds and financial stability: Regulating prime brokers will mitigate systemic risks

We review key characteristics of the hedge fund industry, and identify conditions under which this sector can pose a threat to financial stability. Direct regulation of hedge funds that increases transparency does not appear feasible, may create a moral-hazard problem, and may reduce market liquidity. Indirect regulation by prime brokers and market discipline by creditors, counterparties, and investors have been effective in limiting the risks from the hedge fund sector. To reduce systemic risks, more regulation of prime brokers is warranted to avoid competitive dynamics from undermining counterparty risk management practices.     

Dissecting hedge funds' strategies

This paper dissects the dynamics of the hedge fund industry with four financial markets, including the equity market, commodities, currencies, and debt market by employing a large number of assets from these markets. We employ four main representative hedge fund strategy indices, and a cap-weighted global index to estimate an asymmetric dynamic conditional correlation (ADCC) GJR-GARCH model using daily data from April 2003 to May 2021. We break down the performance, riskiness, investing style, volatility, dynamic correlations, and shock transmissions of each hedge fund strategy thoroughly. Further, the impact of commodity futures basis on hedge funds' return is analyzed. Comparing the dynamic correlations during the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) with COVID-19 pandemic reveals changing patterns in hedge funds' investing styles. There are strong and pervasive shock spillovers from hedge fund industry to other financial markets, especially to futures commodities. An increase in the futures basis of several commodities drives up hedge funds' performance. While hedge fund industry underperforms compared to equity market and commodities, the risk-reward measures show that hedge funds are superior to other markets, and safer than the bond market.     

Incentives and Endogenous Risk Taking: A Structural View on Hedge Fund Alphas

Hedge fund managers are subject to several nonlinear incentives: performance fee options (call); equity investors' redemption options (put); and prime broker contracts allowing for forced deleverage (put). The interaction of these option‐like incentives affects optimal leverage ex ante, depending on the distance of fund‐value from the high‐water mark. We study how these endogenous effects influence performance measures used in the literature. We show that reduced‐form measures that do not account for these features are subject to economically significant false discovery biases. The result is stronger for low‐quality funds. We propose an alternative structural methodology for conducting performance attribution in hedge funds.     

Does the choice of performance measure influence the evaluation of hedge funds?

The Sharpe ratio is adequate for evaluating investment funds when the returns of those funds are normally distributed and the investor intends to place all his risky assets into just one investment fund. Hedge fund returns differ significantly from a normal distribution. For this reason, other performance measures for hedge fund returns have been proposed in both the academic and practice-oriented literature. In conducting an empirical study based on return data of 2763 hedge funds, we compare the Sharpe ratio with 12 other performance measures. Despite significant deviations of hedge fund returns from a normal distribution, our comparison of the Sharpe ratio to the other performance measures results in virtually identical rank ordering across hedge funds.     

Strategic behavior within families of hedge funds

The paper investigates the strategic behavior of hedge fund families. It focuses on decisions to start and liquidate family-member funds. Hedge fund families tend to liquidate funds that underperform compared to other member funds, and to replace them by new ones. By choosing a launch time after a short period of superior performance by their member funds, families extend the spillover to new funds. Hedge fund families seem to be more experienced in promoting their funds and attracting fund inflow than in generating superior performance. This results in higher dollar compensation earned by managers within multi-fund families than in stand-alone funds.     

国际金融系统风险的放大与传导:对冲基金在金融风暴中的作用

作为国际热钱的代表,对冲基金在2007～2008年金融风暴中究竟起了怎样的作用?本文首先分析了对冲基金在危机中去杠杆化操作的原因及后果;通过构造1171家美国上市银行加权平均投资组合,以其月度收益率作为美国银行业代理变量,采用1994～2008年对冲基金月度数据进行经验论证。研究发现:第一,对冲基金去杠杆化放大了系统风险;第二,对冲基金全行业具有杠杆效应的一致性;第三,对冲基金的收益水平与美国银行业紧密相关,因此,对冲基金的行动是资本市场剧烈波动的影响因素,向美国银行业传导了系统风险,推动了金融风暴的形成。最后,本文提出加强对冲基金监管的思路。     

Alumni social networks and hedge fund performance: Evidence from China

Based on unique data of Chinese private hedge funds, we first construct the “strong alumni” (alumni of the same school and the same major) social networks of private hedge fund managers, and examine the impact of alumni social networks on the performance of hedge funds in China. We build a series of alumni networks using the educational background information of 4734 private hedge funds, and perform an empirical analysis on a sample of 1115 private hedge funds products from 2010 to 2019. Different from previous findings of mutual funds, we find that more central network positions of hedge fund managers are associated with better risk-adjusted fund performance. Hedge fund managers with more central positions conduct more active investment styles and receive lower fund flows.¹ The results supplement the evidence that information advantages brought by central position in social networks can influence managers' investment styles, thus improve hedge fund performance.     

Commonality in hedge fund returns: Driving factors and implications

We measure the commonality in hedge fund returns, identify its main driving factor and analyze its implications for financial stability. We find that hedge funds’ commonality increased significantly from 2003 until 2006. We attribute this rise mainly to the increase in hedge funds’ exposure to emerging market equities, which we identify as a common factor in hedge fund returns over this period. Our results show that funds with a high commonality were affected disproportionately by illiquidity and exhibited negative returns during the subsequent financial crisis, thereby providing little diversification benefits to the financial system and to investors.     

Zur Risikoanalyse von Hedgefonds: Ein datenanalytischer Ansatz

Hedge fund returns have a number of specific features compared to traditional investments which result in problems when applying traditional methods of risk analysis (Markowitz portfolio selection theory, Sharpe Ratio, value at risk calculation based on normal returns). These problems have to be considered adequately by insurance companies when constructing internal risk models and performing risk management for hedge funds in their investment.The present paper has its focus on the departure of hedge fund returns from the normality hypothesis, especially with respect to the statistical quantities skewness and kurtosis (fat tail problem). A statistical analysis of hedge fund index returns gives evidence that the majority of hedge fund returns show substantial departures from normality. In addition, the analysis shows that hedge fund returns are adequately represented by the family of GH-distributions developed in exploratory data analysis. Following this result a risk analysis of hedge fund strategies is performed on the basis of the GH-value at risk.     

Activist hedge funds and firm disclosure

This study examines whether firms' disclosure decisions are affected by the presence of activist hedge funds. Using a large sample of firms that experienced increases in ownership by activist hedge funds, we find that firms are more likely to cease providing financial guidance or reduce the information in the guidance in the quarter subsequent to new investment by activist hedge funds. These results hold even for firms that experienced good quarters and consistently provided guidance in previous quarters. Since guidance has been shown to be beneficial to capital market participants in many ways, reduced guidance has meaningful market implications. Our findings highlight a negative and possible unintended consequence of activist hedge funds' investment in firms, which provides some counterbalance to the numerous positive consequences documented in the prior literature on hedge fund activism.