Research and Policy Center Top 10 Publications from 2025

Each year, CFA Institute Research and Policy Center publishes work that helps investment professionals navigate structural change, emerging risks, and innovation across global markets. This year’s most popular pieces reflect that mission. From the expanding role of artificial intelligence (AI) in asset management to capital formation in Africa, tokenization, pensions, and the ethics of private markets, these publications offer practical insight for leaders shaping investment decisions in a rapidly evolving landscape. Below is a selection of the Research and Policy Center’s top publications from 2025.

Edited by Joseph Simonian, PhD, this book from CFA Institute Research Foundation and CFA Institute Research and Policy Center demonstrates how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming asset management. Explore how AI and machine learning (ML) are being applied to portfolio design, risk oversight, and investment decision-making, with insights from leading practitioners and CFA Institute experts.

CFA Institute Research and Policy Center convened net-zero thought leaders and investment luminaries to break down the big ideas around achieving net zero. These Voices of Influence provide practical guidance for investors, asset managers, investment professionals, and regulators. More than 50 authors from the United States, Europe, and Asia collaborated on 16 research projects. The initiative won the 2025 Silver Award for Excellence in Sustainable Development Goals Implementation from the Society for Scholarly Publishing.

This report, edited by  Olivier Fines, CFA and Phoebe Chan,  offers a detailed assessment of the barriers to capital formation across 11 sub-Saharan African jurisdictions. It highlights how private markets, policy reforms, fintech innovation, and public–private partnerships can expand investment, strengthen infrastructure financing, and support economic resilience. Its country-level contributors, many of them CFA charterholders, provide deep local expertise that anchors the analysis in practical realities.

Transparent, explainable AI is essential in finance, not only for regulatory compliance but also for institutional trust, ethical standards, and effective risk governance, as this report by Cheryll-Ann Wilson, PhD, CFA, explains. While automated tools can assist, the report underscores that human oversight and strong organizational alignment remain indispensable.

Joseph Simonian, PhD, addresses the ethical concerns and risks of AI washing (AIW) in finance, providing crucial questions for stakeholders to evaluate managers’ AI claims and ensure transparency, integrity, and the genuine application of AI in investment strategies. The report examines what AIW is, why firms engage in it, and how it affects clients and the broader development of AI. It also offers guidance to asset owners on how to spot both genuine AI use and inflated claims in the marketplace.

This report from Mercer and CFA Institute benchmark retirement income systems worldwide using more than 50 indicators. It rates global pension systems, recommending reforms to improve outcomes and participant trust in an era of aging populations and increasing government intervention.

In part one of this report, Urav Soni, Olivier Fines, CFA, and Jinming Sun, CFA, examine tokenization’s transformative impact on traditional assets. It is a primer on tokenization in which we look at the technical process: what tokenization is, how it works, its value proposition, and current limitations. We also consider the impact this process could have on various asset classes. In part two, Giovanni Bandi, PhD, Olivier Fines, CFA, and Urav Soni examine the legal and regulatory changes needed for tokenization to grow responsibly while ensuring investor protection and market integrity. The report analyzes global regulatory regimes, international standards, and the need for legal clarity.

This first of three modules of an updated CFA Institute Research Foundation guide—ETF Features and Evolving Landscape, written by Joanne M. Hill, PhD, Elisabeth Kashner, CFA, and Dave Nadig—explores the properties, benefits, mechanics, and history of exchange traded funds (ETFs). It describes the factors behind ETF’s exponential growth and evaluates the U.S. ETF landscape.

This report from Stephen Deane, CFA, and Ken Robinson, CFA, CIPM, explores how continuation funds provide liquidity in sluggish private markets, examining their growth, benefits, and the conflicts of interest they present. The report provides an unbiased understanding of what continuation funds are, what has driven their dramatic growth, and what they tell us about private markets. It also explains both the heightened conflicts of interest arising in continuation funds and mechanisms to address them.

Traditional investment wisdom holds that stocks and bonds tend to move in opposite directions, thus offering investors a natural hedge within balanced portfolios. But this longstanding negative correlation has shown signs of reversal. In this CFA Institute Research Foundation research brief, Friedrich Baumann, Abdolreza Nazemi, and Frank J. Fabozzi, CFA, discuss how machine learning can identify macroeconomic drivers of the shifting stock–bond correlation, offering actionable insights for asset allocation and risk management in this research brief.