NEW YORK, July 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Submissions are now being accepted for the second annual SPIVA Awards, S&P Dow Jones Indices announced today. The international awards program recognizes excellence in research on the topic of index-related applications. The SPIVA Awards supports researchers from around the world that explore innovative techniques that enhance the use of indices in the financial markets.

US $45,000 in total prize money (a first prize of $30,000 and an honorable mention of $15,000) will be awarded to individuals or teams for the development of distinctive, high-quality research in the use of financial market indices for investment analysis and management. The SPIVA Award winners will be announced in March 2013, during an awards ceremony in New York City.

Eligible research papers are those completed during the 24 months prior to the submission deadline which have not been published in a refereed journal. Working papers posted on SSRN.com or similar sites are award eligible. Laureates will be selected by a jury of academics and industry experts.

Research should be submitted electronically at www.spindices.com/spiva-awards and must be received by S&P Dow Jones Indices on or before the submission deadline of November 15, 2012. Rules governing the contest can also be found at www.spindices.com/spiva-awards.

The SPIVA panel of judges comprises recognized professionals and academics from S&P Dow Jones Indices, New York University Stern School of Business, Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech, Evensky & Katz of Florida and California's Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business.

Papers should cover topics related to the use of financial market indices in investment programs, products, evaluation, performance or similar activities, which will be broadly defined. This includes such areas as: trading and investing in ETFs, index linked futures, options, swaps, portfolios or funds; hedging, insuring or managing investment risks; and index performance, calculation, or maintenance. Research focusing on applications of indices to investments or topics directly relevant to investment questions is especially welcome.

Papers will be evaluated on the basis of several criteria including: overall presentation, accuracy, quality, completeness of the analysis and relevance to investing with financial market indices. Where papers make use of empirical data, the data must be made available to the judging panel if any member of the panel wishes to review or replicate the analysis for purposes of accuracy. Papers should be the original work of the author(s) submitting the paper.

In its inaugural year, the SPIVA Award for first prize went to Yuliya Plyakha and Grigory Vilkov of Goethe University in Frankfurt and Raman Uppal of Edhec Business School in London for their winning paper, "Why Does an Equal-Weighted Portfolio Outperform Value- and Price-Weighted Portfolios?" which examined the outperformance of equal weighted portfolios. Honorable mention (second prize) was awarded to the team of George Chacko and Sanjiv Das of Santa Clara University and Rong Fan of Gifford Fong Associates for their research paper entitled "An Index-Based Measure of Liquidity" which proposed a new measure for liquidity risk using ETFs.

About SPIVA
The SPIVA (Standard & Poor's Index Versus Active) scorecard reveals quarterly performance data for U.S. equity, international and fixed income mutual funds benchmarked against appropriate asset class indices. More than 3500 actively managed funds are covered in the scorecard. Mutual fund data is derived from CRSP® Survivor-Bias-Free U.S. Mutual Fund Database.

The SPIVA methodology is designed to provide an accurate and objective apples-to-apples comparison of funds' performance versus their appropriate style indices, correcting for factors that have skewed results in previous index-versus-active analyses in the industry.  SPIVA scorecards show both asset-weighted and equal-weighted averages, include survivorship bias correction to account for funds that may have merged or been liquidated during the period under study, and show style consistency for each style group across different time horizons.

About S&P Dow Jones Indices
S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC, a subsidiary of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., is the world's largest, global resource for index-based concepts, data and research. Home to iconic financial market indicators, such as the S&P 500® and the Dow Jones Industrial Average(SM), S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC has over 115 years of experience constructing innovative and transparent solutions that fulfill the needs of institutional and retail investors. More assets are invested in products based upon our indices than any other provider in the world. With over 830,000 indices covering a wide range of assets classes across the globe, S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC defines the way investors measure and trade the markets. To learn more about our company, please visit www.spdji.com.

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SOURCE S&P Dow Jones Indices