Skin or Skim?Inside Investment and Hedge Fund Performance∗ Arpit Guptay Kunal Sachdevaz September 7, 2017 Abstract Using a comprehensive and survivor bias-free dataset of US hedge funds, we docu- ment the role that inside investment plays in managerial compensation and fund per- formance. We find that funds with greater investment by insiders outperform funds with less “skin in the game” on a factor-adjusted basis, exhibit greater return persis- tence, and feature lower fund flow-performance sensitivities. These results suggest that managers earn outsize rents by operating trading strategies further from their capac- ity constraints when managing their own money. Our findings have implications for optimal portfolio allocations of institutional investors and models of delegated asset management. JEL classification: G23,G32,J33,J54 Keywords: hedge funds, ownership, managerial skill, alpha, compensation ∗We are grateful to our discussant Quinn Curtis and for comments from Yakov Amihud, Charles Calomiris, Kent Daniel, Colleen Honigsberg, Sabrina Howell, Wei Jiang, Ralph Koijen, Anthony Lynch, Tarun Ramado- rai, Matthew Richardson, Paul Tetlock, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, Jeffrey Wurgler, and seminar participants at Columbia University (GSB), New York University (Stern), the NASDAQ DRP Research Day, the Thirteenth Annual Penn/NYU Conference on Law and Finance, Two Sigma, IRMC 2017, the CEPR ESSFM conference in Gerzensee, and the Junior Entrepreneurial Finance and Innovation Workshop. We thank HFR, CISDM, eVestment, BarclaysHedge, and Eurekahedge for data that contributed to this research. We gratefully acknowl- edge generous research support from the NYU Stern Center for Global Economy and Business and Columbia University. yNYU Stern School of Business, Email:
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[email protected] 1 IIntroduction Delegated asset managers are commonly seen as being compensated through fees imposed on outside investors.