NBER Working Papers by Christof Stahel

Using hedge fund indices representing eight different styles, we find strong evidence of contagion within the hedge fund sector: controlling for a number of risk factors, the average probability that a hedge fund style index has extreme poor performance (lower 10% tail) increases from 2% to 21% as the number of other hedge fund style indices with extreme poor performance increases from zero to seven. We investigate how changes in funding and asset liquidity intensify this contagion, and find that the likelihood of contagion is high when prime brokerage firms have poor performance (which would be expected to affect hedge fund funding liquidity adversely) and when stock market liquidity (a proxy for asset liquidity) is low. Finally, we examine whether extreme poor performance in the stock, b...

We examine whether hedge funds experience contagion. First, we consider whether extreme movements in equity, fixed income, and currency markets are contagious to hedge funds. Second, we investigate whether extreme adverse returns in one hedge fund style are contagious to other hedge fund styles. To conduct this examination, we estimate binomial and multinomial logit models of contagion using daily returns on hedge fund style indices as well as monthly returns on indices with a longer history. Our main finding is that there is no evidence of contagion from equity, fixed income, and foreign exchange markets to hedge funds, except for weak evidence of contagion for one single daily hedge fund style index. By contrast, we find strong evidence of contagion across hedge fund styles, so that hedg...