How College Endowments Invest for the Future

Researchers assembled an annual time series of asset allocations and investment returns for each school, and analyzed how their investment strategies evolved over the long term, emphasizing major shifts in their allocations to risky assets.

They documented two major shifts in endowment allocations to risky assets, both spearheaded by the Ivies. The first was from bonds to stocks in the 1930s and 1940s, the second from stocks to alternative assets beginning in the 1980s.

The researchers then looked at whether the endowments in the sample really did behave as long-term investors by examining their investment behavior around the time of major financial crises: 1906–1907, 1929, 1937, 1973–1974, 2000 and 2008. Their question: Did endowments buy assets when prices were low and sell them when prices were high?

For each downturn, they calculated the active portfolio allocation to risky assets.

The study concluded that endowments typically exhibited a countercyclical investment pattern — in particular, increasing their allocations to equities after the onset of a crisis — compared with evidence indicating that retail and other investors without the advantage of a long horizon exhibit strongly procyclical behavior.

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