An econometric model of serial correlation and illiquidity in hedge fund returns [An article from: Journal of Financial Economics]

This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Financial Economics, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
The returns to hedge funds and other alternative investments are often highly serially correlated. In this paper, we explore several sources of such serial correlation and show that the most likely explanation is illiquidity exposure and smoothed returns. We propose an econometric model of return smoothing and develop estimators for the smoothing profile as well as a smoothing-adjusted Sharpe ratio. For a sample of 908 hedge funds drawn from the TASS database, we show that our estimated smoothing coefficients vary considerably across hedge-fund style categories and may be a useful proxy for quantifying illiquidity exposure.