UK- The London School of Economics and Political Science is establishing a hedge fund research programme to carry out independent academic research in conjunction with International Asset Management (IAM).

IAM is funding the LSE’s Financial Markets Group for an initial period of three years by sponsoring a fellowship in hedge fund management. A senior LSE academic will take this position and IAM is also funding two PhD scholarships in the same field. LSE’s research team will have access to over twelve years of IAM’s proprietary data on fund performance.

The grant is designed to fund independent analysis of key topics in hedge funds and the team will publish papers to further academic and theoretical understanding of both management and performance.

Research from the project will be published as a series of working papers by the university’s Financial Markets Group and will be presented at seminars and conferences open to interested professionals and academics. The first event in the research programme will be a hedge fund conference held during the next quarter of this year.

Alan Djanogly of IAM said: “we recognise that hedge fund management is relatively under-researched due to the rapid growth of the industry.

“As specialists in this area, we are keen to participate in the furthering of high quality academic research and to this end we have also contributed over twelve years of our comprehensive, proprietary data.“

This joint venture comes a month after UBS Global Asset Management and the LSE launched a new research programme to assess the state of the savings and pensions industries across Europe.

UBS is bankrolling the five year project which will look at the problems of an ageing population and retirement provision in all three pillars- state, occupational and private.

IAM manages portfolios of hedge funds for institutions and high net worth individuals. Founded in 1989, it is one of the older independent specialist hedge fund multi-managers in Europe and it manages over $1.5bn in funds.