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.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
6413.
Length: Date of creation: Feb 1998 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:6413
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Baquero, G. & Verbeek, M.J.C.M., 2005.
"A Portrait of Hedge Fund Investors: Flows, Performance and Smart Money,"
Research Paper
ERS-2005-068-F&A Revision, Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus Uni.
[Downloadable!]
Stephen J. Brown & William N. Goetzmann & Bing Liang, 2003.
"Fees on Fees in Funds of Funds,"
NBER Working Papers
9464, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
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