Singapore’s two largest asset owners, GIC and Temasek, see attractive opportunities in climate adaptation solutions – a relatively underfunded area compared to decarbonisation. The former has already made selective adaptation investments and said the opportunity set across public and private debt and equity could increase to $9 trillion by 2050.
The idea of accessing risk premia through the use of index-based funds and ETFs has been gaining momentum in recent years. Risk premia indexes aim to reflect the equity premia of stock characteristics such as value, size or momentum. Among the risk premia indexes, equally weighted indexes are some of the oldest and most well
This paper by academics at Erasmus University and the University of Chicago shows that hedge funds exhibit persistent exposures to extreme downside risk, and that tail risk is an important determinant of the time-series and cross-section variation of hedge fund returns. Further it concludes that these results are consistent with the notion that a significant
The Callan Investment Institute explores portfolio construction using risk factors in its latest paper. The research finds that while building purely factor-based portfolios is challenging and largely impractical for most asset owners, using factors to understand traditionally constructed portfolios can be very useful. The paper, from the research arm of Callan Associates, looks at ways
In recently released research, Dominic O’Kane, affiliated professor of finance at EDHEC Business School, challenges the assumptions about the operation of the eurozone sovereign-linked credit default swaps (CDS) market. The European Parliament decided to permanently ban so-called “naked” CDS in October 2011 on the back of claims that their speculative use caused or accelerated the
On the back of a continuing shift in corporate pension plans away from defined benefit to defined contribution, Northwestern University’s Joshua Rauh and Indiana University’s Irina Stefanescu look at what causes the resultant freezing of these corporate plans. The paper takes the further step of looking at the consequences for both employees and plan sponsors,
EDHEC-Risk Institute has released a study highlighting the need to reform retirement systems and pension funds. The study Shifting Towards Hybrid Pension Systems: A European Perspective also looks at the need to adopt professional management structures and to considerably improve the product offering of defined-contribution funds. To read the paper click here
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