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Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Will Universities Lower their Endowments by Dis-Investing from Fossil Fuel Companies?
Young people want a free lunch. A benefit of aging is the wisdom of finally understanding the tradeoffs that we must reckon with (the one's your Econ 101 Prof droned on about). Consider the case of University divestment from fossil fuel companies. President Faust's eloquent discussion appears to have had a minimal treatment effect on young greens' views. Now the Chair of Lexecon has released a new working paper exploring the unintended consequences of divestment. You can read it here. He identifies three costs of dis-investing and concludes that they add up to a large loss for such righteous universities. He stresses that a dis-investing university would pay; 1. transaction costs as it changes its portfolio, 2. diversification costs , 3. monitoring costs as it would need to continue to update whether its current portfolio consists of "bad guys". I believe in competition. Let's see a green well trained finance student counter his arguments.