We analyze the returns earned by US educational endowments using style attribution models. For the average endowment, models with only public stock and bond benchmarks explain virtually all of the time-series variation in returns, yield no alpha, and generate sensible factor loadings. Elite...

This paper revisits capital return inequality across university endowments. It combines university-level data on endowment size, investment returns, and portfolio allocations into a unified dataset. Using panel data regression, we replicate Piketty (2014)’s finding of a strong impact of size...

In this paper, we have sought to understand what has been the performance of university endowments, and what drives the observed pattern of performance. Our key observations are as follows: (a) the endowments of elite universities have grown dramatically faster than endowments overall; (b)...