If Katie Price or David Beckham managed a hedge fund, they would probably underperform their rivals, recent research suggests.

That, at least, is one conclusion you could draw from a paper published earlier this month by academics at Edhec Business School and Boston College. It found that a hedge fund with media coverage will, on average, underperform a rival with no coverage by 3.5 percentage points. The difference is more pronounced among smaller funds, and among the largest funds the difference is "not significant".