AQR Launches Annual Competition for Academic Finance Papers

(October 3, 2011) — AQR Capital Management — which has earned aiCIO‘s strategic risk management award this year — has launched their own award for applied academic papers in finance.

“Given the huge burden of future financial obligations, it’s important to have leading thinkers in analytical finance and economics focus their intelligence on methods to enhance investment performance,” states David G. Kabiller, founding partner of AQR and Head of Client Strategies. “The AQR Insight Award has been launched in recognition of the need to promote academic research that illuminates the drivers of successful investing and that can be applied to real-world portfolios.”

According to a release on the study, the competition seeks unpublished papers that analyze investment in liquid assets for both tax-exempt institutional and taxable investor portfolios, with areas of focus including asset allocation, security selection, portfolio implementation, and risk management. “The papers will be assessed according to the novelty and acuity of their insights, and the potential value of those insights deployed within an investor’s portfolio. The former will be weighed by the academic members of the panel, the latter by the investment managers,” a statement by the $40-billion asset management Greenwich, Connecticut-based firm asserts.

Kabiller continues: “AQR is eager to engage these researchers. Based on our experience in helping ideas germinate into actual strategies, we do expect the process to stimulate our own innovation – but our goal here is to recognize the acorns of good research.”

Initial entries are due in January 2012 with up to five finalists invited to present their papers to the panel of judges, which consists of senior members of AQR’s portfolio management team, many of whom are leading academic finance experts from universities such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Northwestern, NYU and the University of Chicago.

Email submissions to insightaward@aqr.com.