Between the wars, Keynes was bursar of King’s College, Cambridge, one of the richest in England, and had the freedom to deploy the considerable assets in its portfolio. Until then, Oxbridge endowments had been invested almost entirely in real estate, but Keynes decided it was worthwhile moving into other assets, because property was riskier than it looked. Whatever you think about his ideas on macroeconomics, this point is very true. This shows up clearly in a new paper called The Rate of Return on Real Estate, by David Chambers of the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School, Christophe Spaenjers of HEC Paris and Eva Steiner of Penn State University’s Smeal College of Business, which is based on data throughout the 20th century for the endowments of four colleges, writes Bloomberg.