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Taxes have a first-order impact on portfolio returns. Most research mistakenly assumes that portfolios command similar tax burdens, or that tax...
- August 2021
- Article
Don't Take Their Word for It: The Misclassification of Bond Mutual Funds
By: Huaizhi Chen, Lauren Cohen and Umit Gurun
We provide evidence that bond fund managers misclassify their holdings, and that these misclassifications have a real and significant impact on investor capital flows. In particular, many funds report more investment grade assets than are actually held in their...
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- July 2021
- Article
Material Sustainability Information and Stock Price Informativeness
By: Jody Grewal, Clarissa Hauptmann and George Serafeim
As part of the SEC’s revision of Regulation S-K, many investors proposed the mandatory disclosure of sustainability information in the form of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data. However, progress is contingent on collecting evidence regarding which...
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Keywords:
Voluntary Disclosure;
Accounting Standards;
Sustainability;
Nonfinancial Information;
Corporate Social Responsibility;
Stock Price Informativeness;
Synchronicity;
Environmental Sustainability;
Corporate Disclosure;
Corporate Accountability;
Stocks;
Price;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Accounting;
Standards
- June 2021
- Case
Modern Endowment Management: Paula Volent and the Bowdoin Endowment
By: Luis M. Viceira, Emily R. McComb and Dean Xu
This case examines modern endowment investment management through the lens of a leadership transition between Chief Investment Officers (CIOs). In March 2021, Paula Volent is about to step down as the CIO of the endowment of Bowdoin College after twenty-one years, and...
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- June 2021
- Case
The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments): April 2021
By: Josh Lerner, Reza Satchu and Alys Ferragamo
The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) is one of the largest pools of investment capital in the world and follows a rigorous “Total Portfolio Framework” in its approach to investment management. In April of 2021, John Graham was just two months into his role...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Once Bitten, Twice Shy: Learning from Corporate Fraud and Corporate Governance Spillovers
By: Trung Nguyen
This paper finds that investors learn from their experience with corporate fraud and financial misconduct and modify their investment behavior to avoid suspicious firms and increase corporate governance efforts. More specially, mutual funds that experienced corporate...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Studying the U.S.-Based Portfolio Companies of U.S. Impact Investors
By: M. Diane Burton, Gurveen Chadha, Shawn A. Cole, Abhishek Dev, Christina Jarymowycz, Leslie Jeng, Laura Kelley, Josh Lerner, Jaime R. Diaz Palacios, Yue (Cynthia) Xu and T. Robert Zochowski
Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the reliance on market-based solutions to social and environmental problems around the world (Barman 2016; Horvath and Powell 2020). The growth of impact investing is a vivid example of this trend and, although there have...
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- May 2021
- Article
Preparing for a Pandemic: Accelerating Vaccine Availability
By: Amrita Ahuja, Susan Athey, Arthur Baker, Eric Budish, Juan Camilo Castillo, Rachel Glennerster, Scott Duke Kominers, Michael Kremer, Jean Lee, Canice Prendergast, Christopher M. Snyder, Alex Tabarrok, Brandon Joel Tan and Witold Wiecek
Vaccinating the world’s population quickly in a pandemic has enormous health and economic benefits. We analyze the problem faced by governments in determining the scale and structure of procurement for vaccines. We analyze alternative approaches to procurement, arguing...
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- April 2021 (Revised July 2021)
- Case
Public Equities Impact Investing at BlackRock
By: Shawn A. Cole, Vikram S. Gandhi, Michael Norris and John Masko
In early 2021, BlackRock—the world’s largest asset manager with $9 trillion in assets under management (AUM)—sought to become a leader in promoting environmental and social sustainability. Over the previous ten years, CEO Larry Fink had written an annual open letter to...
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Keywords:
Impact Investing;
Renewable Energy;
Climate Change;
Environmental Sustainability;
Equity;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Financial Management;
Investment Funds;
Investment Return;
Mission and Purpose;
Organizational Change and Adaptation;
Financial Services Industry;
United States
- March 2021
- Case
Yale Investments Office: November 2020
By: Josh Lerner, Jo Tango and Alys Ferragamo
David Swensen and the Investments Office staff must decide whether to continue to allocate the bulk of the university's endowment to illiquid investments—hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, real estate, natural resources—given the impact of the COVID-19...
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Keywords:
University Endowment;
Asset Allocation;
Real Estate;
Equities;
Fixed Income;
COVID-19;
Asset Management;
Private Equity;
Venture Capital;
Natural Resources;
Resource Allocation;
Investment;
Investment Portfolio;
Health Pandemics;
Financial Crisis;
Financial Services Industry;
Real Estate Industry;
Energy Industry;
Connecticut
- March–April 2021
- Article
How Venture Capitalists Make Decisions
By: Paul A. Gompers, Will Gornall, Steven Kaplan and Ilya Strebulaev
For decades now, venture capitalists have played a crucial role in the economy by financing high-growth start-ups. While the companies they’ve backed—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and more—are constantly in the headlines, very little is known about what VCs actually...
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- Editorial
Why ESG Funds Fail to Scale
By: Gabriel Karageorgiou and George Serafeim
You’ve seen the headlines about the growth in environmental, social, and governance funds. Many investment professionals might read these and believe that launching a new ESG investment firm or ESG offering will be an automatic success. Our analysis of the data shows...
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Keywords:
ESG;
ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance;
ESG Disclosure;
ESG Disclosure Metrics;
ESG Ratings;
ESG Reporting;
Investment Management;
Investment Strategy;
Investments;
Investment Fund;
Sustainability;
Sustainable Finance;
Sustainable Investing;
Investment;
Management;
Strategy;
Investment Portfolio;
Finance;
Growth and Development;
Failure
- January 2021
- Case
The FIRE Savings Calculator
By: Michael Parzen and Paul J. Hamilton
This case follows Carol Muñoz, a member of the Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) lifestyle movement. At the age of 45, Carol is considering retiring and living off the $1 million she has accumulated. Using Monte Carlo simulation, Carol forecasts the...
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- January 2021
- Case
eToro: Building the World's Largest Social Trading Network
By: Elie Ofek and Danielle Golan
Social trading platform eToro was preparing for the launch of its expanded offering in the U.S. The company faced critical decisions regarding product-market fit, go-to-market strategy, positioning and monetization. Moreover, it faced the challenge of how best to make...
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- December 2020
- Article
Stock Market Returns and Consumption
By: Marco Di Maggio, Amir Kermani and Kaveh Majlesi
This paper employs Swedish data containing security level information on households' stock holdings to investigate how consumption responds to changes in stock market returns. We exploit households’ portfolio weights in previous years as an instrument for actual...
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- October 2020 (Revised January 2021)
- Case
Divesting Harvard's Endowment
By: Daniel Green, Luis M. Viceira and Holly Fetter
By early 2020 Harvard University was facing growing pressure from students, faculty, and alumni to divest its $40 billion endowment of financial stakes in fossil fuel producers. Its previous policy of avoiding the issue was quickly becoming outdated—$21 trillion of...
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- October 2020
- Article
IQ from IP: Simplifying Search in Portfolio Choice
By: Huaizhi Chen, Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun, Dong Lou and Christopher J. Malloy
Using a novel database that tracks web traffic on the SEC’s EDGAR servers between 2004 and 2015, we show that mutual fund managers gather information on a very particular subset of firms and insiders, and their surveillance is very persistent over time. This tracking...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Private Equity and COVID-19
By: Paul A. Gompers, Steven N. Kaplan and Vladimir Mukharlyamov
We survey more than 200 private equity (PE) managers from firms with $1.9 trillion of assets under management (AUM) about their portfolio performance, decisionmaking and activities during the Covid-19 pandemic. Given that PE managers have significant incentives to...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Long-Run Returns to Impact Investing in Emerging Markets and Developing Economies
By: Shawn Cole, Martin Melecky, Florian Mölders and Tristan Reed
There is growing interest in impact investing, the idea of deploying capital to obtain both financial and social or environmental returns. Examination of every equity investment made by the International Finance Corporation, one of the largest and longest-operating...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Venture Capitalists and COVID-19
By: Paul A. Gompers, Will Gornall, Steven N. Kaplan and Ilya A. Strebulaev
We survey over 1,000 institutional and corporate venture capitalists (VCs) at more than 900 different firms to learn how their decisions and investments have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We compare their survey answers to those provided by a large sample of...
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- August 2020 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
NextView Ventures
By: Jo Tango and Nori Gerardo Lietz
David Beisel, Rob Go, and Lee Hower are non-partners at different-and-established venture capital (VC) firms. They decide to leave their positions to start a new seed-stage VC firm. The case covers the genesis of the firm, the formulation of its strategy and...
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