Ours is the first study to directly examine the costs of private transparency. More precisely, we examined whether a willingness to offer transparency to investors is beneficial or costly in terms of hedge fund returns. We measured a fund’s willingness to offer transparency by whether it accepts MACs. Here, transparency is private because it is limited to investors in the fund.
Overall, we found no evidence that a willingness to offer transparency harms fund returns. Funds that offer MACs generate somewhat higher returns, albeit not statistically significantly so. This absence of significance holds for raw returns, abnormal returns, and alphas from a multiple-factor model, as well as across different hedge fund sectors. This result also holds regardless of whether the fund is open or closed to new investment