Thanks to a combination of scientific advances and economic incentives, the development of therapeutics to treat rare or “orphan” diseases has grown dramatically in recent years. With the advent of FDA-approved gene therapies and the promise of gene editing, many experts believe we are at an...

Investors have long debated what fraction, if any, of their portfolio's currency exposure they should hedge. Although the answers cover a broad range, often with dubious rationale, most informed investors agree that the solution should be based on mean-variance optimization, deployed either to...

The authors introduce a new index of the business cycle that uses the Mahalanobis distance to measure the statistical similarity of current economic conditions to past episodes of recession and robust growth. Their index has several important features that distinguish it from the Conference...

Investors rely on the stock-bond correlation for a variety of tasks, such as forming optimal portfolios, designing hedging strategies, and assessing risk. Most investors estimate the stock-bond correlation simply by extrapolating the historical correlation of monthly returns and assume that this...

The high cost of capital for firms conducting medical research and development (R&D) has been partly attributed to the government risk facing investors in medical innovation. This risk slows down medical innovation because investors must be compensated for it. We propose new and simple financial...

Factor investing has gained widespread acceptance among institutional investors. Some investors believe it is preferable to stratify the investment universe into factors to manage portfolio risk more effectively, while other investors focus on factors because they believe they yield risk...

This paper explores the application of contingent claims analysis (CCA) to two quot;hotquot; issues in life-cycle finance: (1) investing for retirement and (2) deciding when, if ever, to switch careers. Participants in individual retirement accounts do not have the time or the knowledge to make...

Policy portfolios are a fixture of institutional investment management, but they may not serve the purposes for which they are intended. A policy portfolio serves primarily as an expression of an investor's return and risk preferences. Secondarily, it serves as a benchmark for determining the...

Financial analysts typically estimate volatilities and correlations from monthly or higher frequency returns when determining the optimal composition of a portfolio. Although it is widely acknowledged that these measures are not necessarily stationary across samples, most analysts assume...

We use a proprietary database of private equity returns to measure the excess return of private equity over public equity and to partition it into two components: an asset class alpha and compensation for illiquidity. Our evidence suggests that private equity managers, as a group, generate alpha...