Trust and delegation
By: Stephen Brown ... [et al.].
Contributors: Brown, Stephen.; National Bureau of Economic Research.
Series: NBER working paper series -- working paper 15529; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) -- working paper no.  15529.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: Electronic resource
Description: "Due to imperfect transparency and costly auditing, trust is an essential component of financial intermediation.  In this paper we study a sample of 444 due diligence (DD) reports from a major hedge fund DD firm.  A routine feature of due diligence is an assessment of integrity.  We find that misrepresentation about past legal and regulatory problems is frequent (21%), as is incorrect or unverifiable representations about other topics (28%).  Misrepresentation, the failure to use a major auditing firm, and the use of internal pricing are significantly related to legal and regulatory problems, indices of operational risk.  We find that DD reports are typically performed after positive performance and investor inflows.  We control for potential bias due to this and other potential conditioning.  An operational risk score based on information contained in the DD reports significantly predicts subsequent fund failure and statistical performance characteristics out of sample.  Finally we find that observed operational risk characteristics do not appear to moderate fund flow"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: Title from PDF file as viewed on 12/1/2009.

Includes bibliographical references.

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Mode of access: World Wide Web.