Research on ESG Returns Wins Jacobs Levy Center Prize

by James Comtois, Pensions & Investments, November 1, 2021: The Wharton School’s Jacobs Levy Equity Management Center for Quantitative Financial Research awarded its annual Best Research Paper Prize to Lubos Pastor, Robert Stambaugh, and Lucian Taylor for their paper, “Dissecting Green Returns,”... which attributed the recent success of green assets to increasing environmental concerns and cautions that the premium could diminish if environmental concerns ease. “The implications are important for the investment community while it asserts that green stocks have performed better than brown stocks (environmentally unfriendly stocks) over the last decade, they may now be (too) pricey, so investors should not expect that they will provide the same premium going forward,” said Bruce I. Jacobs, chair of the Jacobs Levy Center’s Advisory Board. Jacobs added, “For Wharton and the Center, this paper is an example of the quality of the papers produced by the faculty at the school. Not only is this good empirical research, but it’s also very topical.”

3 Share Nobel Economics Prize for Work Using Natural Experiments

by James Comtois, Pensions & Investments, October 11, 2021: David Card of U.C. Berkeley, Joshua D. Angrist of MIT, and Guido W. Imbens of Stanford were recognized for their “innovative use of natural experiments to study difficult-to-answer questions about cause and effect,” noted Bruce Jacobs, adding that the winners... “searched for situations in which chance events and changes in institutional rules and policies create groups of people who are treated differently, setting up what amounts to natural clinical trials.”

Jessica Wachter Named SEC Chief Economist and Director of the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis

Press Release, May 3, 2021: The Dr. Bruce I. Jacobs Chair of Quantitative Finance at the Wharton School, Dr. Jessica Wachter, has been appointed Chief Economist and Director of the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis at the SEC.