Hillsdale Investment Management is an independent, employee-controlled, and client-aligned investment boutique that invests money on behalf of a select group of sophisticated institutional and private wealth investors. The lifeblood of Hillsdale’s investment culture is a continuous enhancement of our investment process and knowledge base.
Hillsdale and CFA Society Toronto designed the Research Award in 2010, hoping that providing support and recognition to investment research practitioners would add to the CFA body of knowledge and contribute to the steady improvement of the CFA profession.
Previous winners have included many outstanding papers that remain relevant to us. In 2011, “Is Bigger Better? Size and Performance in Pension Plan Management” led to several amalgamations of Canada’s pension plans. In 2016 “Does Spending Time in the Minors Pay Off” clearly supported Canada’s venture exchange as a superior launching pad for TSX-listed companies over private equity IPOs. In 2021, our winning paper was titled “Board Gender Diversity and Firm Performance: The Role of Firm Size,” finding that small companies were far more likely to gain from gender board diversity, but that forcing board diversity on industries with a non-diverse workforce had a measurably negative effect on firm performance.
Over the past 14 years, the Hillsdale-CFA Society Toronto Research Award winners have been published 9 times, cited over 400 times, and downloaded over 5,000 times from SSRN. This award's value proposition lies in its focus on research dedicated to Canadian capital markets, featuring papers by both academics and practitioners worldwide.