The funded status of US defined-benefit corporate-pension plans continued to worsen last year, despite plan sponsors increasing contributions by $70 billion, a new Mercer study reveals. Mercer found funding levels have slipped to 2009 levels, with the outlook for 2012 likely to extend the bleak news for plan sponsors. The funded status of pension plans … Read more
Australian superannuation funds are now required to disclose a measurement of risk to fund members, with trustees encouraged to use a standardised measurement backed by regulators and industry peak bodies. The Standard Risk Measure will provide a rating of a fund’s investment option based on the likely number of negative returns this option is predicted … Read more
A retirement solution that focuses on outcomes and is customised for each participant cannot be met by existing defined-contribution designs, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist, Robert Merton, who advocates a “next-generation DC solution”. Merton, who is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management’s distinguished professor of finance and resident scientist at Dimensional Fund … Read more
Reaching-for-yield — the propensity to buy riskier assets in order to achieve higher yields — is believed to be an important factor contributing to the credit cycle. This Harvard Business School finance working paper analyses this phenomenon in the corporate bond market. The paper’s authors Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina show evidence for reaching for … Read more
Encouraging the widespread corporate adoption of a majority-voting standard, promoting diversity on boards and collaborating to improve the way funds report environmental performance are just some of the focuses of the CalSTRS corporate governance team. Anne Sheehan, CalSTRS’ director of corporate governance, talked exclusively with top1000funds.com about what the key issues are for the self-described … Read more
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