Using data for more than 800 college and university endowment funds over 2003-2011, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the spending policies used in practice as well as how frequently and why those mandates are revised over time. Given the long-term and relatively static nature of the...

Founded in 1441, King's College was one of Cambridge University's wealthiest Colleges, endowed with a vast agricultural portfolio. John Maynard Keynes was appointed bursar just after WWI and initiated a major reallocation to equities, an innovation at least as radical as the late 20th century...

We jointly model the information choice and portfolio allocation problem of institutional investors who are concerned about their performance relative to a benchmark. Benchmarking increases an investor's effective risk-aversion, which reduces his willingness to speculate and, consequently, his...

A common approach to the management of endowment is to treat it as if it were the only asset of the university. This approach leads to prescriptions for optimal investment and expenditure policies that are essentially the same across universities. Indeed, the resulting optimal portfolio...

Using a large sample of institutional investors' private equity investments in venture and buyout funds, we estimate the extent to which investors' skill affects returns from private equity investments. We first consider whether investors have differential skill by comparing the distribution of...

Despite positive and significant earnings announcement premia, we find that institutional investors reduce their exposure to stocks before earnings announcements. A novel result on the sensitivity of flows to individual stock returns provides a potential explanation. We show that extreme...

This paper examines whether university endowment managers think only in terms of the assets they manage, or also take into account background income, the other flows of income to the university. Specifically, we test whether the level and variability of a university's background income (e.g.,...

Optimal portfolios differ according to the length of time they are held without being rebalanced. For the case in which asset returns are identically and independently distributed, it has been shown that optimal portfolios become less diversified as the holding period lengthens.We show that the...

Momentum in individual stock returns emanates from momentum in factor returns. Most factors are positively autocorrelated: the average factor earns a monthly return of 1 basis point following a year of losses and 53 basis points following a positive year. Factor momentum explains all forms of...

In the finance literature, a common practice is to create factor-portfolios by sorting on characteristics (such as book-to-market, profitability or investment) associated with average returns. The goal of this exercise is to create a parsimonious set of factor-portfolios that explain the...