High Water Marks

William Goetzmann, Jonathan E. Ingersoll, Jr. () and Stephen Ross
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Jonathan E. Ingersoll, Jr.: Yale School of Management, International Center for Finance

Yale School of Management Working Papers from Yale School of Management

Abstract: Incentive fees for money managers are frequently accompanied by high water mark provisions which condition the payment of the incentive upon exceeding the maximum achieved share value. In this paper, we show that these high water mark contracts are valuable to money managers, and conversely represent a claim on a significant proportion of investor wealth. We provide a closed-form solution to the high water mark contract under certain conditions. This solution shows that managers have an incentive to take risks. We conjecture that the existence of high water mark compensation is due to decreasing returns to scale in the industry. Empirical evidence on the relationship between fund return and net money flows into and out of funds suggests that successful managers, and large fund managers are less willing to take new money than small fund managers.

Date: 2004-03-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-rmg
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

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Related works:
Working Paper: High Water Marks (1998)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ysm:somwrk:ysm22

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