Has Harvard University overvalued their assets?

Newell Normand

In a letter to Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins, the Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik said the university’s finances might be more precarious than publicly acknowledged. Much of its $53 billion endowment is invested in private-equity funds that “are often overvalued due to reliance on internal estimates and outdated transaction data,” she said. She might be right. But Harvard doesn’t generate those valuations itself. It gets them from the external managers at the funds where it invests. E.J. Antoni, PhD, Chief Economist, and Richard Aster Fellow at the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, joins Newell to discuss the situation.