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- July 2021 (Revised December 2021)
- Case
Pershing Square's Pandemic Trade (A)
By: Emil N. Siriwardane, Luis M. Viceira, Dean Xu and Lucas Baker
This case explores the decision that Bill Ackman, CEO and founder of the hedge fund Pershing Square Capital, was considering in late February 2020 about hedging the exposure of the fund’s portfolio from the potential financial fallout ensuing from an extreme event like...
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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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- 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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- 2020
- Working Paper
Best Ideas
By: Miguel Antón, Randolph B. Cohen and Christopher Polk
We find that the stocks in which active mutual fund or hedge fund managers display the most conviction towards ex-ante, their “Best ideas,” outperform the market, as well as the other stocks in those managers’ portfolios, by approximately 2.8 to 4.5 percent per year,...
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- December 2019
- Article
Brokers and Order Flow Leakage: Evidence from Fire Sales
By: Andrea Barbon, Marco Di Maggio, Francesco Franzoni and Augustin Landier
Using trade-level data, we study whether brokers play a role in spreading order flow information. We focus on large portfolio liquidations, which result in temporary drops in stock prices, and identify the brokers that intermediate these trades. We show that these...
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Keywords:
Predatory Trading;
Back Running;
Fire Sales;
Brokers;
Stocks;
Price;
Information;
Knowledge Dissemination;
Ethics
- December 2018
- Case
Corporate Transformation at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany
By: Joseph B. Fuller, Amy C. Edmondson, Daniela Beyersdorfer and Tonia Labruyere
When Stefan Oschmann became CEO and chairman of the executive board of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, in 2016, the company had started its transformation from a mid-tier traditional German industry player to a global modern science and technology player. The...
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- 2018
- Working Paper
Detecting Anomalies: The Relevance and Power of Standard Asset Pricing Tests
By: Malcolm Baker, Patrick Luo and Ryan Taliaferro
The two standard approaches for identifying capital market anomalies are cross-sectional coefficient tests, in the spirit of Fama and MacBeth (1973), and time-series intercept tests, in the spirit of Jensen (1968). A new signal can pass the first test, which we label a...
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- Fourth Quarter 2017
- Article
Optimal Tilts: Combining Persistent Characteristic Portfolios
By: Malcolm Baker, Ryan Taliaferro and Terry Burnham
We examine the optimal weighting of four tilts in U.S. equity markets from 1968 through 2014. We define a “tilt” as a characteristic-based portfolio strategy that requires relatively low annual turnover. This is a continuum, with small size (a very persistent...
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- Article
What Do Private Equity Firms Say They Do?
By: Paul A. Gompers, Steven N. Kaplan and Vladimir Mukharlyamov
We survey 79 private equity investors with combined assets under management (AUM) of over $750 billion about their practices in firm valuation, capital structure, governance, and value creation. Investors rely primarily on internal rate of return (IRR) and multiples to...
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- August 2016 (Revised July 2017)
- Background Note
Brand Portfolio Strategy and Brand Architecture
By: Jill Avery
While companies choose to brand their products and services in many different ways, there are some central tenets that help define an optimal brand portfolio and associated brand architecture. Brand portfolio strategy involves the design, deployment, and management of...
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- 2017
- Working Paper
Optimal Tilts: Combining Persistent Characteristic Portfolios
By: Malcolm Baker, Ryan Taliaferro and Terry Burnham
We examine the optimal weighting of four tilts in US equity markets from 1968 through 2014. We define a “tilt” as a characteristic-based portfolio strategy that requires relatively low annual turnover. This is a continuum, with small size, a very persistent...
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- 2015
- Working Paper
What Do Private Equity Firms Say They Do?
By: Paul A. Gompers, Steven N. Kaplan and Vladimir Mukharlyamov
We survey 79 private equity investors with combined assets under management (AUM) of over $750 billion about their practices in firm valuation, capital structure, governance, and value creation. Investors rely primarily on internal rate of return (IRR) and multiples to...
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- Article
Portfolio Value-at-Risk Optimization for Asymmetrically Distributed Asset Returns
By: Joel Goh, Kian Guan Lim, Melvyn Sim and Weina Zhang
We propose a new approach to portfolio optimization by separating asset return distributions into positive and negative half-spaces. The approach minimizes a newly-defined Partitioned Value-at-Risk (PVaR) risk measure by using half-space statistical information. Using...
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- July–August 2011
- Article
Robust Optimization Made Easy with ROME
By: Joel Goh and Melvyn Sim
We introduce ROME, an algebraic modeling toolbox for a class of robust optimization problems. ROME serves as an intermediate layer between the modeler and optimization solver engines, allowing modelers to express robust optimization problems in a mathematically...
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- January 2011
- Case
AIC Netbooks: Optimizing Product Assembly
By: Steven C. Wheelwright and Sunru Yong
AIC Systems, located in Taichung, Taiwan, is a manufacturer of printed circuit boards, primarily for motherboards and video cards for personal computers. The firm is considered an original design manufacturer (ODM) and takes an active role in innovating and designing...
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- Article
Optimal Value and Growth Tilts in Long-Horizon Portfolios
By: Jakub W. Jurek and Luis M. Viceira
We develop an analytical solution to the dynamic portfolio choice problem of an investor with power utility defined over wealth at a finite horizon, who faces a time-varying investment opportunity set, parameterized using a flexible vector autoregression. We apply this...
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- November 2007
- Background Note
Asset Allocation I
By: Joshua D. Coval, Erik Stafford, Rodrigo Osmo, John Jernigan, Zack Page and Paulo Passoni
The goal of these simulations is to understand the mathematics of mean-variance optimization and the equilibrium pricing of risk if all investors use this rule with common information sets. Simulation A focuses on five to 10 years of monthly sector returns that are...
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- November 2007
- Background Note
Bayesian Estimation & Black-Litterman
By: Joshua D. Coval and Erik Stafford
Describes a practical method for asset allocation that is more robust to estimation errors than the traditional implementation of mean-variance optimization with sample means and covariances. The Bayesian inspired Black-Litterman model is described after introducing...
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- 1989
- Other Unpublished Work
Optimal Portfolio Rules in Continuous Time When the Nonnegativity Constraint on Consumption is Binding
By: Robert C. Merton