Seventy-five years of investing for future generations

Abstract

University endowments invest for future generations, so their strategy should reflect their long horizon. Our research question is whether they really do behave like long-term investors. We examine the behavior of U.S. endowments since 1945 and draw comparisons with earlier periods. Employing a long-run dataset on 12 major universities, we examine their preferences for risky assets and document their big strategic moves into equities and later into alternatives. We then analyse how they invest around crises and the extent to which they exploit their long-horizon advantage. We find that on average endowments do indeed invest countercyclically at such times, particularly when increasing their allocation to risky assets after a crisis.