Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with GBH reporter Hannah Loss about whether buying or renting a home is a better financial move. “I’m not saying people shouldn’t buy homes,” says Gruber. “I’m just saying that they should do it as a rational economic calculation. They should account for their propensity to save and whether they can handle the uncertainty of homeownership. They shouldn’t do it because their parents said it was a good idea.”
Katie Rae, CEO of The Engine, an entity created by MIT to help support tough tech startups, speaks with Akshat Rathi of Bloomberg about the importance of investing in climate technology. “We have fundamental risks that, if we don’t tackle with real deep science and engineering, that will take us a full step forward, or two steps forward, we’re in trouble,” says Rae.
A new study from researchers at MIT and Dartmouth suggests that the speed of automation should be halved, reports Adi Gaskell for Forbes. Their paper showed that “while investments in automation usually result in higher productivity in firms, and therefore often more employment, it can be harmful to those who are displaced, especially if they have few alternative options,” writes Gaskell.
Tom Davenport, a visiting scholar at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, writes for Forbes about Telstra Ventures, a venture capitalist firm that invests in tech firms and its incorporation of data science into its investing criteria. “It seems inevitable that other venture capitalist firms will begin to make more data and analytics-driven decisions in the future,” writes Davenport.
Forbes contributor Rick Miller spotlights “In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest,” a new book by Prof. Andrew Lo and Prof. Stephen Foerster of the University of Western Ontario. The book “provides historical perspective on the development of modern investment theory and practice,” writes Miller.
Wall Street Journal reporter Mark Hulbert writes that a new study by MIT researchers finds that most investors “can do much better than the one-size-fits-all approach to equity allocations that target-date funds offer for your retirement portfolio.”
A new study by Prof. S.P. Kothari and Prof. Eric So finds that payment for order flow is not bad for investors.The researchers found that “the price improvement for retail investors using Robinhood was better than price improvement that institutional investors receive when they trade small lots of public exchanges,” reports Felix Salmon for Axios.
In a segment for Planet Money, Greg Rosalsky spotlights a paper co-authored by Prof. Lawrence Schmidt that examines investor performance and finds that elite financiers often excel at buying stocks but perform poorly when it comes to selling stocks. "My big takeaway from this paper is even when we look at a sample of extremely talented, highly incentivized expert investors, they are still people," says Schmidt.
The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Zweig examines the investment strategies of former Institute Prof. Paul Samuelson, including his purchases of Berkshire Hathaway stock in the early 1970s. Zweig notes, “In an interview this week, [Warren] Buffett says Prof. Samuelson believed the same thing he does: that markets are 'generally very efficient but not perfectly efficient.'”
MIT Sloan Prof. Antionette Schoar discusses her research on sidecar funds versus main buyout funds with Peter Barnes, Pat Carroll and Janet Wu on Bloomberg Radio. “When you compare the performance [of the two funds], we find that the side vehicle is underperforming the main funds of the partnerships that are sponsoring them,” explains Schoar.
In a commentary on CNBC, graduate student J. Daniel Kim and a co-author describe research with Prof. Pierre Azoulay and the U.S. Census Bureau on the average age of successful entrepreneurs. By working with the U.S. Census Bureau, they were able “to examine all businesses launched in the U.S. between 2007 and 2014, encompassing 2.7 million founders.”
Katie Rae, managing director of The Engine, has collaborated with other Boston-based female investors to create FemaleFounders.org. The group will hold “office hours” that will encourage “entrepreneurs to get to know women investors and build a community,” writes Ron Miller for TechCrunch.
Spun out of Sloan’s Billion Prices Project, PriceStats tracks millions of items sold online and produces a daily measure of U.S. consumer prices, allowing investors to track inflation faster.“By producing a daily index of prices…it has a considerable jump on figures that government entities calculate monthly,” writes Eric Morath of the Wall Street Journal.