The International Centre for Pension Management at the University of Toronto named the winner of its 2026 research award on Monday, recognizing excellence on topics with relevance to fund management.
The winner of the 2026 award, “The Pricing of Geopolitical Tensions Over a Century” by researchers Andrei Gonçalves, Allesandro Melone and Andrea Ricciardi at Ohio State University, will receive C$50,000 ($35,491) from ICPM. The trio’s research analyzed market responses to geopolitical risks.
The research decomposed geopolitical risk into two parts—geopolitical threats and geopolitical acts—and found very different consequences on financial markets. Their analysis of nearly a century of data found that threats are what investors and firms actually respond to.
“The quality of the finalist presentations this year was extremely high. The Research Council found all of them very thought-provoking and innovative for the pension community. This resulted in a very active and meaningful deliberation among the Research Council members,” said Mike Simutin, ICPM’s associate director of research and a professor of finance at the Rotman School of Management, in a statement. “We congratulate the winner of the top prize and strongly believe all finalists have the potential to impact the industry.”
Finalists for the award were the following papers and authors:
- “The Private Capital Alpha” by Gregory Brown (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Andrei Gonçalves (Ohio State University), Wendy Hu (MSCI);
- “Efficient Decumulation Strategy with Health Risk and Bequest” by Jennifer Alonso-García (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Jonathan Ziveyi (UNSW Sydney), Mengdie Hu (UNSW Sydney), Yuxin Zhou (UNSW Sydney); and
- “Dollar Asset Holdings and Hedging Around the Globe” by Wenxin Du (Harvard Business School), Amy W. Huber (University of Pennsylvania).
Finalists presented their work to the ICPM Research Council in Toronto in early October. Each presentation was followed by a question-and-answer session to enable the audience to dive deeper into the research and examine the strength and applicability of the findings, ICPM reported when it announced the winning paper and the finalists.