The risk-return characteristics of art as an asset have previously been studied through aggregate price indexes. By contrast, we examine the long-run buy-and-hold performance of an actual portfolio, namely the collection of John Maynard Keynes. We find that its performance has substantially...

University endowments invest for future generations, so their strategy should reflect their long horizon. We researched whether they really do behave like long-term investors. We examined the behavior of US endowments since 1945 and drew comparisons with earlier periods. Using a long-run data...

Real estate—housing in particular—is a less profitable investment in the long run than previously thought. We hand-collect property-level financial data for the institutional real estate portfolios of four large Oxbridge colleges over the period 1901–1983. Gross income yields initially...

This study exploits a new long-run data set of daily bid and offered exchange rates in spot and forward markets from 1919 to the present to analyze carry returns in fixed and floating currency regimes. We first find that outsized carry returns occur exclusively in the floating regime, being zero...

The Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global was recently ranked the largest fund on the planet. It is also highly rated for its professional, low-cost, transparent, and socially responsible approach to asset management. Investment professionals increasingly refer to Norway as a model for...

It is often thought that the arrival of the Black Scholes Merton (BSM) model of option pricing in the early 1970s allowed traders to understand how to price and value options with greater precision. Yet, our study suggests that interwar commodity option traders may have been able to intuit...

We study market segmentation effects using data on U.S. railroads that list their bonds in New York and London between 1873 and 1913. This sample provides a unique setting for such analysis because of the precision offered by bond yields in cost of capital estimation, the geography-specific...