The Eighth Public Investors Conference

The Bank for International Settlements, the World Bank, the Bank of Canada and the Banca d’Italia announce a renewed call for papers for the Eighth Public Investors Conference on Portfolio and Risk Management for central banks, sovereign wealth funds and public pension plans. The pandemic situation permitting, the conference will be held on 27–28 October 2022 at the Headquarters of the Bank of Canada in Ottawa, Canada.

Since 2008, the Bank for International Settlements and the World Bank, in corporation with partner institutions, have organised this biennial conference to discuss policy issues, quantitative methods and the current challenges for central banks, sovereign wealth funds and public pension plans. The conference aims to promote an exchange of innovative ideas among practitioners and academics, to encourage knowledge-sharing and collaboration across organisations, and to foster the development and dissemination of best practices in public sector portfolio and risk management.

Background and topics

The last several years have challenged public investors in unprecedented ways. Prolonging the earlier environment of low interest rates and compressed term premia, the Covid-19 outbreak has challenged the outlook for asset prices, while highlighting the need to ensure adequate liquidity of investment portfolios. The sharp, but uneven, subsequent recovery has compounded the challenge, as extraordinary monetary and fiscal policy measures have interacted with a waxing and waning pandemic. More recently, the debate over the extent to which inflationary pressures will prove transient has forced yet another reassessment of investment decisions, tied in with questions about the timing and extent of the likely process of policy normalisation. Meanwhile, a growing sense of urgency around climate-related risks has led investors of all types to redouble their efforts to incorporate sustainability considerations into their investment processes are giving rise to additional trade-offs in asset allocation decisions.

In this context, the Eighth Public Investors Conference will explore a range of relevant issues, with emphasis on the following:

• New methodologies for risk-return modelling that incorporate the risks of the current environment.
• Integration of environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations into the investment process.
• Robust asset allocation and asset-liability models for public investors.
• Emerging technologies and their application to portfolio construction as well as investment and risk management.

Submission procedure

Proposals (in the form of an abstract with preliminary findings and a supporting outline, or a working paper) should be submitted in electronic format by 15 May 2022 to [email protected], together with a short curriculum vitae.

The conference’s advisory committee will review all submissions, and authors will be informed of the outcome by 1 July 2022.

The selection of proposals will be based upon, among other criteria, their quality and relevance to the conference. Final presentations will then be due by 16 September 2022.

Finally, and as for previous conferences, the advisory committee will consider the possibility of publishing selected papers from the conference in a set of proceedings.