Publications

April 2024
Article

Fee Variation in Private Equity

By: Juliane Begenau and Emil N. Siriwardane

We study how investment fees vary within private-capital funds. Net-of-fee return clustering suggests that most funds have two tiers of fees, and we decompose differences across tiers into both management and performance-based fees. Managers of venture capital funds... View Details

Keywords: Pension Funds; Fee Dispersion; Search And Negotiation Frictions; Private Equity; Investment Funds

Web

Business Economics - Doctoral

lens of business. Jointly administered by HBS and the Department of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the program combines theoretical analysis with in-depth,... View Details

2024
Working Paper

The Rise of Alternatives

By: Juliane Begenau, Pauline Liang and Emil Siriwardane

Since the 2000s, U.S. public pensions have shifted their risky investments towards alternative assets like private equity and hedge funds, some more aggressively than others. We explore several explanations for these cross-sectional trends, focusing on those implied by... View Details

Keywords: Investment Funds; Investment Return; Risk and Uncertainty

Web

Finance Curriculum - Faculty & Research

, Richard Ruback January 2026 J 3.0 Investment Management and Capital Markets Luis Viceira , Emil Siriwardane Fall 2025 Q1Q2 3.0 Investment Strategies William Vrattos Spring... View Details

Web

Behavioral Finance & Financial Stability

clients. See Marco’s other research here , Francesco’s other research here , and Amir’s other research here . More Info Do Banks have an Edge? By: Juliane Begenau & Erik... View Details

September 2017 (Revised July 2021)
Case

Asset Allocation at the Cook County Pension Fund

By: Emil Siriwardane, Juliane Begenau and Yuval Gonczarowski

Nickol Hackett, chief investment officer of the Cook County Pension Fund, is responsible for investing the fund’s $9 billion worth of assets on behalf of the employees of Cook County, Illinois. Like many other defined-benefit pensions at the time, the Cook County... View Details

Keywords: Asset Management; Investment Funds; Financial Strategy; Decision Choices and Conditions

Educators

Purchase

2019
Working Paper

Do Banks Have an Edge?

By: Juliane Begenau and Erik Stafford

Overall, no! We show that the level and time series variation in cash flows for most bank activities are well matched by capital market portfolios with similar interest rate and credit risk to what banks report to hold. Ignoring operating expenses, bank loans earn high... View Details

Keywords: Banks; Market Efficiency; Bank Capital; Bank Debt; CAPM; Banking; Bank Deposits; Bank Funding Advantage; Leverage; Maturity Transformation; Replicating Portfolio; Efficiency; Banks and Banking; Capital Markets; Performance Evaluation; Performance Efficiency; Banking Industry; United States

2020
Working Paper

An Empirical Guide to Investor-Level Private Equity Data from Preqin

By: Juliane Begenau, Claudia Robles-Garcia, Emil Siriwardane and Lulu Wang

This note provides guidance on the use of investor-level private equity data from Preqin for empirical research. Preqin primarily sources its cash flow data through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with U.S. public pensions. Our focus is on the components of... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity Returns; Prequin Data; Private Equity; Analytics and Data Science; Investment Return

2024
Working Paper

Fire Sales of Safe Assets

By: Gabor Pinter, Emil Siriwardane and Danny Walker

We use trade-level data to study price pressure effects in the UK gilt market from September to October 2022. During this period, forced sales by liability-driven investment funds (LDIs) led to price discounts on the order of 10%, accounting for roughly half the total... View Details

Keywords: Investment Funds; Capital Markets; United Kingdom

Web

Research - Behavioral Finance & Financial Stability

Juliane Begenau & Erik Stafford NOV 2019 By decomposing bank activities into passive and active components and... View Details

2018
Working Paper

OTC Intermediaries

By: Andrea L. Eisfeldt, Bernard Herskovic, Sriram Rajan and Emil Siriwardane

Over-the-counter (OTC) markets for financial assets are dominated by a relatively small number of core intermediaries and a large number of peripheral customers. In this paper, we develop a model of trade in a core-periphery network and estimate its key structural... View Details

Keywords: OTC Markets; Intermediaries; Dealers; Credit Default Swaps; Risk Sharing; Networks; Price; Risk and Uncertainty

2016
Working Paper

Financial Regulation in a Quantitative Model of the Modern Banking System

By: Juliane Begenau and Tim Landvoigt

How does the shadow banking system respond to changes in the capital regulation of commercial banks? This paper builds a quantitative general equilibrium model with commercial banks and shadow banks to study the unintended consequences of capital requirements. A key... View Details

Keywords: Capital; Commercial Banking