Seminal papers on the size of the firm emphasise the benefits of in-sourcing over outsourcing services from the market. This provides a rationale for the development of large firms, especially in circumstances of market risk and uncertainty as to the price and quantity of available services....

The Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo) was established in 2008 to manage approximately C$70 billion on behalf of 26 pension, endowment, and government reserve funds in the Province of Alberta. The fund's over-arching goal is to earn incremental return on risk over what our clients...

Private participation in public infrastructure is expected to bring operational efficiency gains and diversified access to large pools of financial capital. However, due to the heterogeneous and politically salient nature of infrastructure, the financial performance of infrastructure is often...

This paper focuses upon asset owners, such as pension funds, and their models of investment management, recognizing the choice between insourcing, outsourcing and re-intermediation. Drawing upon the principal-agent problem, the dimensions of the management ‘problem' are identified emphasizing...

Innovation and Energy are likely to be two of the most attractive investment themes in the coming years. The world is moving to an increasingly technical and digital age, and the search for renewable sources of energy intensifies as the detrimental impacts of climate change increase in frequency...

The increasing complexity and de-localization of finance has allowed for an obfuscation of fees and costs that asset managers charge to asset owners. This obfuscation has, in turn, led to a distortion in the underlying incentives that asset owners set for the capitalist system. In this chapter,...

A growing number of institutional investors are unhappy with the exposures they have to long-term alternative asset classes, such as private equity, infrastructure and real estate. This frustration has little to do with the underlying assets. Rather, it relates to the sub-optimal access points...

Investment returns are produced by combining financial assets with human capital, the decision-making protocols of investment institutions, and the electronic infrastructure which supports the flow of information about investment opportunities. At the centre of the production process stand...

As alternative data steadily become mainstream in finance, institutional investors may benefit from rethinking how they engage with alternative datasets. Specifically, they could gain from rethinking 1) alternative data's value proposition, 2) how they characterize alternative data, and 3) how...

Through a multi-modal empirical analysis of the data-management experiences of large institutional investors (‘Giants'), we find that these entities are struggling to: 1) utilize data efficiently; and 2) consistently achieve desired levels of data quality. We use these findings to design a new...