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...

Previous measures of the incidence of public investment in higher education focus on the transfer to public college students. This implies that the net benefits to students who do not attend public colleges is negative. However, they miss potential general equilibrium effects on the private...