Allocations and Returns of Endowments

How do U.S. non-profit endowment funds allocate and perform? In their November 2019 paper entitled “The Risk, Reward, and Asset Allocation of Nonprofit Endowment Funds”, Andrew Lo, Egor Matveyev and Stefan Zeume examine recent asset allocations and investment returns of U.S. public non-profit endowment funds. Due to the unstructured nature of asset reporting, they manually assign each asset in each fund to one of nine categories: (1) public equity; (2) fixed income; (3) private equity; (4) cash instruments; (5) hedge funds; (6) real estate; (7) real assets and real return; (8) trusts; and, (9) cooperative investments. Using tax return data encompassing 34,170 endowment funds during 2009 through 2018, they find that: (more…)