Investing Research Articles

Do alternative investments (real estate, venture capital, private equity, hedge funds, private credit, infrastructure and energy investments) offer attractive returns and diversification, buffering investors from the vagaries of the stock market? In his March 2025 paper entitled “The Demise of Alternative Investments”, Richard Ennis examines contributions of alternative investments (alts) to pension fund and endowment… Keep Reading

Alternative assets (private equity, private market real estate, hedge funds and other assets apart from stocks and bonds) constitute approximately 30% of U.S. public pension fund portfolios and 60% of large U.S. endowment portfolios. Are they beneficial? In his August 2023 paper entitled “Have Alternative Investments Helped or Hurt?”, Richard Ennis examines impacts of alternative… Keep Reading

How would currently popular asset allocation strategies have performed back to the end of 1925? In their January 2023 paper entitled “A Century of Asset Allocation Crash Risk”, Mikhail Samonov and Nonna Sorokina test the following seven widely used asset allocation strategies back to 1926 using a combination of actual and modeled returns for many… Keep Reading

Does actual performance support the view that university endowments are exemplary stewards of multi-asset class portfolios? In his November 2021 paper entitled “The Modern Endowment Story: A Ubiquitous U.S. Equity Risk Premium”, Richard Ennis re-examines aggregate allocations and performance of U.S. educational endowments. Specifically, he: Estimates effective aggregate endowment asset class allocations over different recent… Keep Reading

Why have U.S. public pension, endowment and other non-profit funds (institutional investors) consistently underperformed simple, investible passive benchmarks since 2008? How should they remedy that underperformance? In his April 2021 paper entitled “How to Improve Institutional Fund Performance”, Richard Ennis summarizes prior papers quantifying post-2008 institutional investor returns and recommends how institutions can improve this… Keep Reading

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… Keep Reading

Does multi-class investing boost performance for sophisticated investors such as educational endowments? In his June 2020 paper entitled “Endowment Performance and the Demise of the Multi-Asset-Class Model”, Richard Ennis examines recent performance of educational endowment funds, with focus on allocations to alternative assets. Using performance data from a report on 774 university endowments and from… Keep Reading

What are asset class return expectations and associated portfolio allocations of very sophisticated U.S. investors? In their February 2019 paper entitled “The Return Expectations of Institutional Investors”, Aleksandar Andonov and Joshua Rauh analyze disclosures of expected returns across asset classes among U.S. public pension funds, which hold assets of about $4 trillion (see the first… Keep Reading

Below is a weekly summary of our research findings for 12/24/18 through 12/28/18. These summaries give you a quick snapshot of our content the past week so that you can quickly decide what’s relevant to your investing needs. Subscribers: To receive these weekly digests via email, click here to sign up for our mailing list.

Do non-profit endowments beat the market with their investments? In their November 2018 paper entitled “Investment Returns and Distribution Policies of Non-Profit Endowment Funds”, Sandeep Dahiya and David Yermack estimate investment returns and distribution rates for a broad and unbiased (not self-reported or self-selected) sample of U.S. non-profit endowment funds. Using annual IRS Form 990 filings for 28,696 organizations… Keep Reading