This paper explores the relationship between nonprofit board governance practices and government contracting. Monitoring by a board is one way a governmental agency can help to insure quality performance by its contractors. Agencies could thus use both their selection process and their...

New York City provides many of its services via contracts with nonprofit agencies. In this paper, we report on a recent survey of the governance practices of those agencies. The survey collected information from the Executive Directors of over 400 city contractors and more than 4000 of the board...

This paper presents empirical results of the effects of board structure and composition on individual board level performance using data from New York City nonprofits. The results support a model of executive behavior in which the nonprofit executive uses his or her power to push boards towards...

In the late 1990's, the average university endowment has experienced extraordinary growth. This paper investigates the effects of this growth on donations. In particular, the paper focuses on whether or not donations by particular kinds of donors are "crowded out" by endowment growth. A simple...

We use an iterative relocation algorithm to identify factors in common stock returns. The benefit of the approach is that factors are portfolios of assets with non-negative weights. As a result, they are readily interpretable in terms of the characteristics of the underlying securities. The...

Abstract: This paper analyzes a new database of substantially all stocks listed on the NYSE over its early history. We collect prices and dividends from primary sources -- i.e. financial periodicals -- for all listed stocks on the New York Stock Exchange over its early history. We construct a...

We examine the performance of the off-shore hedge fund industry over the period 1989 through 1995 using a database that includes both defunct and currently operating funds. The industry is characterized by high attrition rates of funds, low covariance with the U.S. stock market, evidence...

This study examines the diversification decisions of more than 60,000 individual investors during a six year period (1991-96) in recent U.S. capital market history. The majority of investors in our sample are under-diversified and the extent of under-diversification is more severe in retirement...

Alfred Cowles' (1934) test of the Dow Theory apparently provided strong evidence against the ability of Wall Street's most famous chartist to forecast the stock market. In this paper, we review Cowles' evidence and find that it supports the contrary conclusion -- that the Dow Theory, as applied...

It is now well known that the Sharpe ratio and other related reward-to-risk measures may be manipulated with option-like strategies. In this paper we derive the general conditions for achieving the maximum expected Sharpe ratio. We derive static rules for achieving the maximum Sharpe ratio with...