Articles

Vol.21, No.1, 2023 by Sanjiv R. Das and Greg Ross We develop a methodology using dynamic programming for goals-based wealth management over long horizons where portfolio rebalancing uses the standard securities and also derivative securities. A kernel density estimation approach is developed to accommodate derivative assets, solving a high-dimensional problem with fast computation. The approach… Read more

Vol.21, No.1, 2023 by Kevin Khang, Antonio Picca, Shaojun Zhang and Minzhi Zhu The last decade’s dramatic democratization of factor investing has broadened its investor base to individual investors and their advisors. This paper studies the performance of classic allocation strategies—1/N, mean–variance, and minimum-variance—from these investors’perspective. Specifically, we curate commonly available long-only factor funds, adjust… Read more

Vol.21, No.1, 2023 by Andrew Chin and Yuyu Fan We apply text-mining techniquesin earnings call transcriptsto extract meaningful features that capture management and investment community signals. Using a corpus of transcripts of earnings calls for global companies from 2010 to 2021, we create fundamentally driven features spanning document attributes, readability, and sentiment on different sections… Read more

Vol. 20, No. 4, 2022 by Vasant Dhar When should we trust machine-based and human decisions in finance? In this article I answer this question by drawing on two sets of insights about decision error. I first draw on research of leading theorists on human decision-making and prediction, summarized through a set of articles and… Read more

Vol. 20, No. 4, 2022 by Fabio Alessandrini, David Baptista Balula and Eric Jondeau This paper evaluates the impact of a screening process based on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores for an otherwise passive portfolio of investment-grade corporate bonds. The main result is that a global exclusion strategy leads to a substantial improvement of… Read more

Vol. 20, No. 4, 2022 by Brian Jacobsen, Eddie Cheng and Wai Lee Climate change is a risk investors are thinking about, but how can it be practically incorporated into an asset allocation framework? This paper presents two different approaches. One is a traditional approach where the covariance matrix and excess return vector is adjusted… Read more

Vol. 20, No. 4, 2022 by Janina Kolle, Harald Lohre, Erhard Radatz and Carsten Rother The 2015 Paris Agreement is a landmark in limiting emissions and targeting global warming well below 2◦C, preferably 1.5◦C compared to pre-industrial levels. In this light, we investigate how to efficiently construct equity portfolios that help mitigating climate change risk… Read more

Vol. 20, No. 4, 2022 by Stephen Horan, Elroy Dimson, Clive Emery and Kenneth Blay ESG investment strategies have experienced a massive inflow of capital over the past decade despite investors having few methods to evaluate their performance and communicate their ESG values, objectives, and preferences to investment managers. This paper develops a three-dimensional performance… Read more

Vol. 20, No. 4, 2022 by Ashwin Alankar and Myron Scholes Two common methods that portfolio managers use to reduce the carbon footprint of their portfolios are either to exclude carbon emitters from their portfolios or to engage/cajole underlying companies to reduce their carbon footprint by taking actions to reduce emissions. We estimate the costs… Read more