Out of the Dark: Hedge Fund Reporting Biases and Commercial Databases

Adam Aiken, Christopher P. Clifford and Jesse Ellis

The Review of Financial Studies, 2013, vol. 26, issue 1, 208-243

Abstract: We examine the potential for selection bias in voluntarily reported hedge fund performance data. We construct a set of hedge fund returns that have never been reported to a commercial hedge fund database. These returns allow a direct comparison of performance between funds that choose to report to commercial databases and funds that do not. We find that funds that report their performance to commercial databases significantly outperform nonreporting funds. Our results suggest that the voluntarily reported performance in commercial databases suffers from a selection bias that may exaggerate the average skill of the universe of hedge fund managers. The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. , Oxford University Press.

Date: 2013
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