The Kroner Center for Financial Research (KCFR), at the University of California San Diego was founded in 2019 with the mission to improve the dialogue between major asset owners around the world – including sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, foundations and their beneficiaries – and the academic community in economics and finance.  The KCFR provides benefits to academic researchers is financial support for relevant new research, access to new data sets and tools shared by member asset owners/CIOs, and a venue to present new research, to network with, and to gain feedback from industry experts.

Please refer to https://rady.ucsd.edu/why/centers/kroner/index.html for details. 

This year we identified the following topics:

• Measuring and modeling geopolitical risk. How should geopolitical risk be reflected in long-term capital market assumptions for pension plans and endowments?
• Benchmarking benchmarks. Standards for calculating and presenting investment performance are based on the principles of fair representation and full disclosure; one of the most important elements in the fair representation of investment performance according to the CFA Institute is the choice of a benchmark. How should pension plans and endowments ideally select benchmarks to fulfill their mandates?
• Exploring potential unintended consequences of over-diversification. Understanding that diversification is essential to optimal risk/reward, have asset allocations become too complex or over-diversified? Have they become too expensive due to fees, time-consuming to monitor, leading to unintended or hidden operational risks, global  geopolitical or regulatory exposures? Building on more common diversification approaches currently used by pension funds and endowments - such as by asset class, factors, geographies, sectors, or commodity classes - are there new techniques that permit other types of cross portfolio exposures to be identified, isolated and diversified to improve total portfolio properties?
• Rethinking private markets as an asset class. Private equity has grown exponentially over the last 20 years and plan sponsors have continued to increase their allocations to private equity in an effort to meet return expectations.  What underlying risks, perhaps increased competition/capital or the end of an era of low costs of leverage, are not sufficiently widely addressed in the study of private equity as an asset class?

The Kroner Center calls for scholars to submit a proposal for a research project that addresses one of the three topics.  Proposals will be reviewed by a committee drawn from the Center Academic Advisory Committee. The review committee will be chaired by Professor Andrew Karolyi of Cornell University. The goal is to fund one project for each of the three topics.    Proposals should be no longer than 5 pages and should describe the research idea, expected methodology to be employed, and data requirements. If a proposal is related to an existing working paper or publication by the submitter, then these are also welcome as part of the submission. Principal and co-investigators should submit updated CVs.

To submit a proposal please send your submission by November 1, 2023 to Joe Sturtevant at jsturtevant@ucsd.edu. The expectation is that the proposal selection process will conclude with authors informed of a decision by December 15, 2023.   For more information, see https://rady.ucsd.edu/why/centers/kroner/index.html.