Essays on Fund Families

Abstract

In the first essay of this dissertation, I study the impact that hedge fund manager connections have on investment ideas. I find that hedge fund managers who previously worked at the same prior hedge fund invest more similarly, hold more overlapping portfolios, and trade and overweight the same stocks relative to managers who do not share an employment connection. Overall, these results support theoretical prediction that networked managers share ideas that leads to price discovery for commonly held stocks. The second essay analyzes the role of ETFs in mutual fund families and is joint work with Caitlin Dannhauser. We study mutual fund and ETF twins - index funds from the same family that follow the same benchmark. We find that mutual fund twins have lower overall tax burdens while ETF twins have higher long-term yields and unrealized capital gains, but are compensated with lower expense ratios. Fund families benefit because twin offerings generate higher flows than their non-twin peers. These results support previous research that mutual fund families use diversification and subsidization to benefit the overall family. In the third essay, I study the use of latent factors in explaining hedge fund returns. Using an alternative latent factor estimator, asymptotic principal components (APC), I find explains more of the common variation of hedge fund returns on average and does so with greater efficiency than that found in the literature. I also identify an increase in the common variation across hedge fund excess return in the time-series via the extracted latent factors. My results suggest an impetus for future researchers to employ APC factors when characterizing hedge fund performance.