Paper weighs the shift to DC

On the back of a continuing shift in corporate pension plans away from defined benefit to defined contribution, Northwestern University’s Joshua Rauh and Indiana University’s Irina Stefanescu look at what causes the resultant freezing of these corporate plans. The paper takes the further step of looking at the consequences for both employees and plan sponsors, … Read more

US public pension funds underperform

US public-pension funds significantly underperform their global peers in real-estate portfolios due to a propensity to manage the assets externally, according to a new ICPM-sponsored research paper by three Maastricht University academics. Value added from funds management in private markets: an examination of pension fund investments in real estate looks at real-estate investing among the … Read more

Rotman ICPM research

The Rotman International Centre for Pension Management (ICPM) has approved five research projects for funding this year, including a behavioural-finance project by Swedish academics, to investigate plan members’ views of the “extended” fiduciary duty of pension funds. This project, to be conducted by Joakim Sandberg, Anders Biel and Magnus Jansson from the University of Gothenburg … Read more

MSCI: the data toolmaker

With hundreds of indexes, portfolio and risk analytics, and a growing emerging-markets and environmental, social and governance (ESG) focus, MSCI is a business in constant evolution, but chief executive and chairman, Henry Fernandez, says institutional investors are demanding further development, such as private-equity indexes. Fernandez has been chief executive of MSCI since 1996, when the … Read more

EDHEC-Risk: reform retirement

  EDHEC-Risk Institute has released a study highlighting the need to reform retirement systems and pension funds. The study Shifting Towards Hybrid Pension Systems: A European Perspective also looks at the need to adopt professional management structures and to considerably improve the product offering of defined-contribution funds. To read the paper click here