Survival of Hedge Funds: Frailty vs Contagion

In this paper we examine the dependence between the liquidation risks of individual hedge funds. This dependence can result either from common exogenous shocks (shared frailty), or from contagion phenomena, which occur when an endogenous behaviour of a fund manager impacts the Net Asset Values of other funds. We introduce dynamic models able to distinguish between frailty and contagion phenomena, and test for the presence of such dependence effects, according to the age and management style of the fund. We demonstrate the empirical relevance of our approach by measuring the magnitudes of contagion and exogenous frailty in liquidation risk dependence in the TASS database. The empirical analysis is completed by stress-tests on portfolios of hedge funds.