2006 Moskowitz Prize
I had the pleasure last night of awarding the 2006 Moskowitz Prize to Brad Barber of Cal Davis for his excellent study of the CalPERS corporate governance focus list. The Center for Responsible Business at Haas has issued a press release on the award, which is here.
Two other papers received Honorable Mention, the first time the judges have recognized more than one runner up. Both are interesting and very much worth your time:
Harrison Hong and Marcin Kacperczyk did a terrific retrospective analysis of tobacco stock returns, using state-of-the-art risk models and going back to the 1920s. Social investors won't be thrilled to hear that this one class of sin stocks has delivered significantly superior risk-adjusted performance for most of that time period.
The judges also awaded an Honorable Mentionn to Baruch Lev, Christine Petrovits, and Suresh Radhakrishnan for their paper on the relationship between corporate charitable giving and firm growth. This is the first study of this topic I have seen since Navarro's Journal of Business study back in 1988, and one that will be of great interest to SRI clients.
I have posted abstracts of all of these studies in the bibliography section of sristudies.org.
