The latest
Research

Investing In Climate Change 2009

One year ago, we published Investing in Climate Change: An Asset Management Perspective. We argued that the growing investment opportunities in climate change were driven by long-term mega-trends that would continue into the foreseeable future. One year on, the absolute necessity to act now to mitigate and adapt to climate change is even more urgent, […]
STAFF WRITERNovember 12, 2008
Research

Realization Utility: an inbuilt bias to transact

We study the possibility that, aside from standard sources of utility, investors also derive utility from realizing gains and losses on assets that they own. We propose a tractable model of this “realization utility,” derive its predictions, and show that it can shed light on a number of puzzling facts. These include the poor trading […]
STAFF WRITERNovember 4, 2008
Research

Friends or Foes? The Stock Price Impact of Sovereign Wealth

This paper examines the stock price impact of 163 announcements of Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) investments. We document an average positive risk-adjusted return of 2.1 percent for target firms during two days surrounding SWF acquisition announcements. The announcement effect is both statistically and economically significant. A multivariate analysis shows that the degree of transparency of […]
STAFF WRITERNovember 4, 2008
Research

Defining Moments: the future for pension funds and the pension fund industry

The goal of the research was to drill deeply into the evolving forces in the industry and present a plausible picture of its future landscape, through both near-term and longer-term trends. Our time horizon looked out towards 2020. We, however, acknowledge the considerable difficulties with longer-range forecasting given the increasing pace of change. There is […]
STAFF WRITERNovember 4, 2008
Research

Infrastructure on the Defensive

The unwinding of several high profile infrastructure funds in the recent past has prompted questions as to the performance of infrastructure assets/investments and the impact of the current credit markets, on the outlook for the sector. Mercer remains positive on the long-term fundamentals for the infrastructure sector, especially in the emerging markets. Moreover, we believe […]
STAFF WRITERNovember 4, 2008
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