The Pacific Center for Asset Management (PCAM) 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. With the input of members of a CIO Advisory Council and an Academic Advisory Council, we seek to identify topics that are under-researched, but of high importance in asset management, and invite proposals for independent academic research on them. 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. For details, please go to https://rady.ucsd.edu/centers/pcam/index.html.

This year we identified the following topics:

• Costs of sustainable investing
• Pension fund governance systems
•The challenge of biases in pension fund investment decisions

Submission Process:

The PCAM 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 PCAM 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 15, 2021 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, 2021.