New Developments in Long-Term Asset Management
Over the last 30 years, the asset management industry has experienced exceptional growth in size and sophistication. This period has been marked by the emergence of large pools of assets associated with entities such as sovereign wealth funds, public and private pension plans, life insurance companies, and endowed institutions in the not-for-profit sector. Many of these portfolios are managed with a long-term perspective. These pools of assets play an increasingly important role in ensuring the welfare of the current and future generations of citizens in the countries that have created them.
To promote research on issues that bear on long-term asset management, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), with the support of Norges Bank Investment Management, has hosted a series of research conferences. Plans are now underway for the ninth such conference, which will be held in Chicago, Illinois on Saturday, April 19, 2025. The meeting will be co-organized by NBER Research Associates Annette Vissing-Jorgensen and Luis M. Viceira. It will feature six paper presentations involving theoretical and applied research on asset allocation, risk, and performance measurement and a joint keynote address by Motohiro Yogo of Princeton University Department of Economics and Ralph Koijen of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The NBER Asset Pricing and Corporate Finance programs will convene in Chicago on the previous day, Friday, April 18.
The conference themes are long-term risk and return, and long-term investing, broadly defined. Potential topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Models of asset allocation and asset liability management
- Macroeconomic drivers of expected return and risk
- Links between monetary policy, asset prices, and risk
- Drivers of risk, return, and liquidity at the asset class level
- Implications of risk sharing among heterogeneous investors for asset pricing and asset allocation
- Investment risk diversification and inflation protection at long horizons
- Investment styles
- Optimal asset allocation with illiquid assets
- Optimal spending policies for institutional investors
- Behavioral, institutional, and agency aspects of delegated asset management and institutional investors' decisions and performance
The conference organizers welcome submissions of both empirical and theoretical research, and encourage submissions from scholars who are early in their careers, who are not NBER affiliates, and who are from groups that are under-represented in the financial economics profession. Please share this call with others who may be interested in submitting a paper.
A summary of the previous conferences in this series, along with many of the papers that have been presented.
To be considered for inclusion on the program, papers must be uploaded by 11:59pm EST on February 13, 2025.
Please do not submit papers that have been accepted and scheduled for publication by April 2025. Authors chosen to present papers will be notified in late February. The NBER will pay a modest honorarium to the authors of each paper that is included on the program, and will cover economy class travel and hotel expenses for up to two authors per paper and for discussants.
Questions about this conference may be addressed to rshannon@nber.org.