Over the past twenty years, colleges have invested an increasing share of their endowment assets in “alternative investments.” Prior to 2009, an alternatives emphasis had been widely credited for the sterling endowment investment returns earned by many colleges. However, with college...

I show that an expansion of student loan supply affects parents' saving decisions and portfolio allocation. By exploiting policy-induced variation on expected student aid, I find a 2.2 pp increase in the parental saving rate, from 4.9% to 6.1%. The mechanism that drives this result is the...

This work analyzes the optimal allocation of assets over the life cycle of an investor who has the option to invest in his education. We characterize the optimal spending rule for education, and compare the optimal asset allocation of such investors with the optimal portfolios of investors with...

When applying Excel to finance, there exist many issues, such as how to focus on hands-on experience, how to inspire students to learn Excel, how to teach macros and how to get data into our spreadsheets in the first place. This paper offers a brand new approach with the following features....

We consider philanthropy by college alums from an innovative and provocative perspective: what if prospective college students were considered members of assets classes with different risk-return combinations? Using forty years of merged admissions-philanthropy records on students at a highly...

In the presence of conditional charity, universities must undertake costly revenue raising to qualify as prospective recipients of private donations. This paper considers the donation portfolios of U.S. universities between 2003 and 2014 to investigate whether a strategy that includes beliefs...

I examine how differences in the ability to identify profitable investment opportunities contribute to wealth inequality. I analyze a model of financial markets with investors heterogeneously informed about future returns. The unconditional wealth share distribution features a thick right-tail...

Recent advances in behavioral genetics have enabled the discovery of genetic scores linked to a variety of economic outcomes, including education. We build on this progress to demonstrate that the same genetic variants that predict educational attainment independently predict household wealth in...

This article proposes a practical method to accomplish a previously elusive task: measuring human capital with monetary values on the statement of financial position, such as the balance sheet.Human capital is shown to comply with the definition of a right-of-use asset, as defined in the IASB...