Volume 18, No. 1, 2020 Christopher Polk, Mo Haghbin and Alessio de Longis Factor cyclicality can be understood in the context of factor sensitivity to aggregate cash-flow news. Factors exhibit different sensitivities to macroeconomic risk, and this heterogeneity can be exploited to motivate dynamic rotation strategies among established factors: size, value, quality, low volatility and… Read more
Articles
A Blueprint for Integrating ESG into Equity Portfolios
Jennifer Bender, Todd Bridges, Chen He, Anna Lester and Xiaole Sun Volume 16, No. 1, 2018 Environmental, social and governance (ESG) offers a source of new and potentially valuable information for investors, impacting both potential returns and risk. Growing data availability has created the opportunity to integrate ESG into equity portfolios for a variety of… Read more
Environmental, Social, and Governance Criteria: Why Investors Should Care
Ravi Jagannathan, Ashwin Ravikumar and Marco Sammon Volume 16, No. 1, 2018 We argue that even money managers who care only about risks and returns are likely to benefit from incorporating Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria into their investment process. ESG-related issues can cause sudden regulatory changes and shifts in consumer tastes, resulting in… Read more
Assessing Risk Through Environmental, Social and Governance Exposures
Jeff Dunn, Shaun Fitzgibbons and Lukasz Pomorski Vol. 16, No 1, 2018 We discuss risk and return implications of incorporating environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations in an investment strategy and argue that ESG exposures may be informative about the risks of individual firms. We show empirically that stocks with worst ESG exposures have volatility… Read more
How to Calibrate the Risk of Buyout Investments? Through Buyout-Backed Initial Public Offerings
Volume 15, Number 4, 2017 Jean-François L’Her, Ram Karthik and Stéphanie Desrosiers This paper proposes to use the public market returns of buyout-backed initial public offerings (BO-backed IPOs) as a proxy for buyout funds’ appraisal-based returns. Because they provide an economically significant route to exit, and their leverage and fund ownership are still significant three… Read more
A Portfolio Strategy with Hedge Funds and Liquid Alternatives
Volume 15, Number 4, 2017 E. William Stone and Paul J. White The advent of liquid alternatives in mutual fund format in recent years has brought with it challenges and opportunities with regards to portfolio strategy. Interpretation of these vehicles as return enhancers or risk diversifiers can lead to very different approaches in portfolio construction… Read more
Investment Horizon Risk and Volatility Metrics
Volume 15, Number 4, 2017 Robert Korkie We re-examine the literatures’ disparate conclusions that stock returns are more (less) volatile over longer investment horizons. We claim that the commonly employed variance ratio is incapable of generally determining whether investment risk increases with investment horizon. We demonstrate that the use of effective returns and standard deviation… Read more
The Impact of Costs on Recent Target Date Fund Performance
Volume 15, Number 4, 2017 C. Edward Chang, Thomas M. Krueger and Mark A. Wrolstad Target date funds (TDFs) are rapidly becoming a common means to prepare for retirement. Given the swelling demand for these funds, this research is a timely look at TDFs’ most recent decade. As of March 2016, 518 TDFs have been… Read more
What is Value in an Equity Market?
Volume 15, Number 3, 2017 Michael Suen, Hany Guirguis, Stan Beckers and Ted Theodore What is value in an equity market? Among investors, there is no universally accepted definition. This paper constructs a value index for the US equity market using the Stock and Watson (1988, 1991) methodology. The new value index is derived from… Read more
Multi-Period Portfolio Rebalancing with Personal Tax
Volume 15, Number 3, 2017 Ganlin Xu This paper compares two heuristic rebalancing rules for taxable accounts. The first one is trading X percent annually. The second one is based on the result of recent research, which indicate there existence of no-trading zone. The no-trading zone is obtained by using a quadratic function to approximate… Read more