Academic Research Insight

What percentage of COO/CCO/CTOs in Finance are Women?

This is the second article in a series on women in leadership roles. To dig deeper into where women are in finance we analyzed 36,499 functional positions for the COO, CCO, and CTO roles in 29 countries, including 25 developed markets and Brazil, Russia, India, China (the “BRICs”). All public and private firms in the finance industry were included regardless of market capitalization or other characteristics.

The Relationship Between the Value Premium and Interest Rates

We've been suffering through the deepest and longest drawdown in values history. Looking for a scapegoat to explain the lackluster performance many have pointed to low interest rates as the root cause of the underperformance. The question is have interest rates impacted value in the past?

ESG Investing: Dissecting Green Returns

In theory green stocks should have lower expected returns, this however, is not what we've seen. So the question is what has caused the outperformance of green stocks? And has that outperformance cost value investors their returns?

Value and Momentum Factors? Naw, Focus on the Music Factor!

Can market sentiment be derived from the tunes that your fellow countrymen are listening to? According to the research summarized here you'll find that there is important market information buried in the listening habits of Spotify users.

You Thought P-Hacking was Bad? Let’s talk about “Non-Standard Errors”

Most readers are familiar with p-hacking and the so-called replication crisis in financial research (see here, here, and here for differing views). Some claim that these research challenges are driven by a desire to find 'positive' results in the data because these results get published, whereas negative results do not get published (the evidence backs these claims).

But this research project identifies and quantifies another potential issue with research -- the researchers themselves! This "noise" created by differences in empirical techniques, programming language, data pre-processing, and so forth are deemed "non-standard-errors," which may contribute even more uncertainty in our quest to determine intellectual truth. Yikes!

Size, Value, Profitability, and Investment Factors in International Stocks

Using data on 65,000 stocks from 23 countries, they evaluated the performance of the Fama-French factors, examining the factor premia in global markets to verify their robustness across different company size categories and geographical regions. Their data sample covered the period 1987-2019.

Why Do Investors Hold ESG Investments?

There was really only one question investigated in this research: Are social preferences and values the main drivers of an SRI investors' choice of SRI mutual funds?

Chasing Low Beta Loses Alpha

One of the big problems for the first formal asset pricing model developed by financial economists, the CAPM, was that it predicts a positive relationship between risk and return. However, empirical studies have found the actual relationship to be basically flat, or even negative. Over the last 50 years, the most “defensive” (low-volatility or low-beta, low-risk) stocks have delivered both higher returns and higher risk-adjusted returns than the most “aggressive” (high-volatility, high-risk) stocks.

Do Financial Advisors Transmit their Biases to Clients? Yes.

Are there similarities in the trading behavior of financial advisors and their clients? Are fees paid by advisors and clients similar too? Are advisers overconfident in their skill at identifying active managers and in their ability to outperform passive investments?

The Vanishing Illiquidity Premium

Liquidity—the ability to buy and sell significant quantities of a given asset quickly, at low cost, and without a major price concession—is valuable to investors. [...]

What percentage of CFO/CAOs are Women?

In this original research, Elisabetta and I study data across 29 global markets and provide empirical data on the following question: What percentage of CFO [...]

Do factors have a role in asset allocation?

The Role of Factors in Asset Allocation Mark KritzmanJournal of Portfolio ManagementA version of this paper can be found hereWant to read our summaries of academic [...]

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