LIQUIDITY SHOCKS AND HEDGE FUND CONTAGION

Nicole M. Boyson, Christof W. Stahel and René M. Stulz

In an earlier paper, we investigate whether hedge funds experience worst return contagion—that is, correlations in extremely poor returns that are over and above those expected from economic fundamentals. We find strong evidence of contagion among hedge funds using eight separate style indices for the period from January 1990 to October 2008: the probability of a worst return in a particular index is increasing in the number of other indices that also have extremely poor returns. We then show that large adverse shocks to asset and funding liquidity strongly increase the likelihood of this contagion. In this paper, we further investigate contagion between hedge funds and main markets. We uncover strong evidence of contagion between hedge funds and small-cap, mid-cap and emerging market equity indices, high-yield bonds, emerging market bonds, and the Australian Dollar. Finally, we show that this contagion between hedge funds and markets is also significantly linked to liquidity shocks, especially for small-cap domestic equities, Asian equities, high-yield bonds, and the Australian Dollar.