Recommended articles about investment

Studies:

1. How institutional investors’ shareholder voting reflects their ideologies and values. The majority of shares in publicly traded companies in the US are held by institutional investors, who collectively have a large say on the broad objectives of these corporations. This column shows that there is a systematic correlation between the type of institutional investor and their shareholder voting ideology. The two key dimensions of ideology are social responsibility and management discipline. 
2. Trade and investment in the global economy. Foreign direct investment has traditionally been viewed as a key driver of prosperity, and modern FDI has also become a vehicle for transferring intangible assets. This column uses a counterfactual experiment based on a hypothetical world with no outward or inward FDI to and from low-income and lower-middle-income countries to examine the effects of FDI on trade, domestic investment, and welfare. World welfare falls by about 6% and all countries lose out, with some poorer countries losing over 50%. World trade falls by 7%, with the losses again unevenly distributed.
3. Hedging climate change news. Climate change threatens financial resilience. This column introduces two indices of climate change news and a strategy to use them to build a portfolio that hedges the risk of negative climate news. The method improves climate risk hedging both in and out of sample. To stimulate further research, the time series have been made publicly available.
4. Heterogeneity everywhere: Survey beliefs and portfolio allocations. Though economists have made progress determining how investors form expectations, less is known about how those expectations inform portfolio choices. Until recently, few large-scale surveys contained the data to connect individual investors’ beliefs to their actual behaviour. This column uses data collected from a novel ongoing survey eliciting investors’ expectations about GDP growth and future stock and bond returns. By measuring the extent to which investors’ persistent and heterogeneous beliefs and confidence correspond to their portfolio allocations, the research presented here highlights the potential for survey data to inform macro-finance theories.
5. Retail investor leverage and speculation. Policymakers for long have attempted to curb financial speculation while preserving markets for useful trading. This column analyses the impact of a recent US policy which restricts leverage in the foreign exchange market. It finds that the policy reduced speculative trading without impeding markets, and thus provides important lessons to address excessive growth in financial markets.

Statistics:

• BIS international banking statistics at end-March 2019
• BIS global liquidity indicators at end-March 2019

Others issues to be considered:

1. Negative Interest Rates: Carry an Umbrella at All Times (CFA Institute).
2. Countries With the Highest Housing Bubble Risks (The Big Picture).
3. China’s corporate defaults at record high (VOXEU).
4. Impact investing: can funds achieve both social impact and returns at scale? (LSE Business Review).