It is well known that the disappearance of hedge funds
from a database may cause biases in estimating investment returns on these
funds, although there is no consensus on why hedge funds stop reporting to
data-gathering services. Some studies have suggested that poor or failing funds
stop reporting, while others claim that it is the better-performing funds that
stop reporting because they no longer need to attract new capital. Analysis of
the TASS database reveals that hedge fund returns become significantly poorer at
the end of a fund's reporting life. Other analysis here applies survival time
techniques to examine funds' time to failure and changes in hazard rates
(probabilities of failure) over time. Larger hedge funds and better-performing
funds have lower hazard rates.