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...

Spurred on by the recent financial crises, a growing number of institutional investors are working to bypass traditional financial intermediaries, agents and centers through the development of in-house teams of investment professionals. As such, the institutional investment community, which is...

The financial services industry, which has ballooned from an 8 to 40% share of all after tax corporate profits created in the American economy over the past 50 years, is undergoing an evolutionary shift. Following a period of sustained growth in assets and power, significant advancements in...

A growing number of institutional investors are turning away from external asset managers and other intermediaries and are instead looking to one another for assistance. Through collaboration, these investors hope to lever a new set of network economies. Can they actually co-invest successfully...

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...

One of the major trends over the past decade among Long-Term Investors (LTIs), such as pension funds and government funds, has been to move towards a more direct method of investing. The financial crisis of 2008-09 accelerated this ‘disintermediation', in particular within long-term private...

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,...

The global financial crisis and its aftermath put into sharp relief the structure and performance of the global financial services industry. Questions have been raised as to what intermediaries separately and together add to the production of investment returns and social welfare (in general)....

The idea that superior knowledge is required to drive financial outperformance runs counter to some of the most pervasive theoretical frameworks used by investors today. The Efficient Market Hypothesis and the Capital Asset Pricing Model, for example, posit that capital markets are efficient and...

Alternative data (alt-data) is becoming an increasingly powerful tool that investors can use to incorporate sustainability considerations – e.g., environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors – into their decision-making. But alt-data must be used responsibly. Failure to do so can...