Researchers at BlackRock and Morningstar may be breaking out some champagne this week.

Ananth Madhavan BlackRock Managing Director, Global Head of Research for ETFs and Index Investing

Yesterday Richard Michaud, president and CEO of New Frontier Advisors, confirmed that BlackRock managing director Ananth Madhavan, BlackRock director Alexsander Sobczyk, Morningstar Investment Management quantitative research chief James Xiong, and MIM president Tom Idzorek won the 2019 "Special Distinction Awards," part of the Harry M. Markowitz Awards from New Frontier and the Journal of Investment Management. This is the tenth year of the awards, which are named after the Nobel prize-winning economist.

Madhavan and Sobczyk penned a paper called "Does Trading by ETF and Mutual Fund Investors Hurt Performance? Evidence From Time and Dollar-Weighted Returns." Idzorek and Xiong wrote a paper called "Quantifying the Skewness Loss of Diversification." (The latter pair seem to conclude that diversification is in fact not a free lunch.) For each winning paper, the authors received a $5,000 honorarium for the award.

The top prize (which includes a $10,000 honorarium) went to "Funding Long Shots," a paper by a trio of professors from different schools: John Hull, professor of derivatives and risk management at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto; Andrew Lo, finance professor and director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at MIT's Sloan School of Management; and Roger Stein, adjunct professor at the Stern School of Business at NYU. 

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