The latest
Research

Raising ESG ratings with improved returns

While environmental, social and governance factors may be all the rage in investment strategies, the right tools to measure results of their implementation would make tangible what skeptics might think are the emperor’s new clothes. Cue researchers Zoltán Nagy, Doug Cogan and Dan Sinnreich from MSCI with their December 2012 paper, Optimizing ESG Risk Factors […]
STAFF WRITERJanuary 30, 2013
Research

What is intergenerational justice?

In the paper Pension Funds, Sovereign-wealth Funds and Intergenerational Justice from the Norwegian School of Economics, those Scandinavians have come up with something better than the national alcohol monopoly: a natty new finance term. “Intergenerational justice” (try saying it thrice after a glass of aquavit) seems to refer to a combination of two things: a […]
STAFF WRITERNovember 28, 2012
Research

Handy Sandy:
analysing the hurricane

When Hurricane Sandy descended on the east coast of the United States and headed inland, it forced the closure of all the nation’s financial markets. Christopher Finger and Oleg Ruben at MSCI thought this was important because, although there are plenty of precedents for natural disasters in terms of economic impact, the storm was singular […]
STAFF WRITERNovember 14, 2012
Research

The procyclicality premium

Moving with business cycles, procyclical stocks have been found to yield higher average returns than countercyclical stocks. William Goetzmann and Akiko and Masahiro Watanabe use 50 years of real GDP growth expectations from economists’ surveys to determine forecasted economic states in order to avoid the effects of econometric forecasting model error. The scholars created a […]
STAFF WRITERNovember 9, 2012
Research

Leverage aversion, efficient frontiers and the efficient region

This paper suggests a new specification for leverage aversion, which may better capture the unique risks of leverage. The authors also introduce mean-variance-leverage efficient frontiers, comparing them with conventional mean-variance efficient frontiers. They conclude that leverage aversion can have a large impact on portfolio choice. Leverage aversion, efficient frontiers and the efficient region
STAFF WRITERNovember 7, 2012
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