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The flow of cash funds from employer‐sponsored pension plans into mutual funds has been an important driving force behind the mutual fund industry's unprecedented recent growth. The increased attractiveness of mutual funds to pension investors is due to a shift from defined benefit to defined contribution plans, to changes in the tax laws, and to the growing recognition of certain types of mutual funds as suitable long‐term investment vehicles. Accompanying the tremendous growth in defined contribution plans, however, has been a shift in investment risk from employers to employees. Using the responses from a nationwide telephone survey of 2,000 mutual fund shareholders, this paper analyzes various characteristics and investment knowledge of purchasers of mutual funds through employer‐sponsored pension plans. The results show that overall, pension investors are as knowledgeable about the costs, risks, and returns associated with mutual funds as investors who purchase mutual funds through other distribution channels. However, when dividing the sample of pension‐plan investors into two subsamples consisting of those who purchase mutual funds solely through the pension channel and those also employing other distribution channels, pension‐channel‐only investors are found to be significantly less knowledgeable. These results suggest that there is much room for improvement in investor education for a large segment of pension‐channel investors.

This issue of Managerial Finance brings together five papers that explore the manifold dimensions of pension issues. The papers document and explain the dynamic changes occurring in the management and functioning of private pension plans within an evolving institutional and regulatory framework. Although the papers predominantly focus on the U.S. pension system, the issues addressed and the attendant implications are relevant to economies in the throes of developing or reforming pension security arrangements for market participants.

A sample of twenty‐six Mexican and fifty‐nine Canadian equities listed on the New York Stock Exchange are examined to determine whether these foreign equities outperform the S&P 500 as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994. Data are tested for significant differences in performance before and after the introduction of NAFTA during the period 1980‐2000. Findings show no significant post‐NAFTAdifference in the three‐year performance of the Mexican equities. However, the post‐NAFTA sample of Canadian equities significantly outperformed the S&P 500 by 28.8 percent, perhaps suggesting a NAFTA‐related wealth effect for the Canadian firms.

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how to use the Elton, Gruber, and Padberg [1978] model to construct optimal portfolios and to facilitate the use of this paradigm by providing an example of how the technique is used. The EGP model uses the risk‐adjusted, excess return for an asset to determine the optimal portfolio for a given risk‐free rate of return. This paper shows exactly how to calculate the optimal portfolio and provides a True Basic@ program to do so. The data used are constructed from Capital International Indexes taken from various issues of Barrons from March 1978 to December 1986.

This paper aims to provide guidelines for upstream social marketing strategy on to whom, how and when social marketers can undertake upstream social marketing.

This article is a conceptual piece using academic literature to justify and conceptualise an approach to communicating with and influencing upstream actors.

Specifically, it looks at the characteristics of policymakers targeted, then targeting methods, with a special focus on the use of media advocacy. Finally, a process of government decision-making is presented to explain message timing and content.

Specific criteria to judge time of decision-making and implementation guidelines are provided for social marketers.

In the case of complex social problems, such as obesity and environmental degradation, structural change is needed to provide people with the ability to change (Andreasen, 2006). Strategic social marketing has identified upstream social marketing as a method to influence structural change through policymakers (French and Gordon, 2015); however, literature in the area tends to be descriptive and there are no clear guidelines to its implementation (Dibb, 2014). This article seeks to provide those guidelines.

Means, medians and SD for available socio‐economic status (SES) black‐white differences are here substituted for those of IQ in a between‐groups model published by the author over a decade ago. The goodness of fit of the SES variables used is compared with that for the earlier IQ data. Even when SES variables are relatively successful this can be viewed as additional evidence of the importance of IQ differences to black‐white differences in delinquency.

WHERE are we going? The aim is to double our standard of living in the next 25 years and, as Sir Alexander Fleck, K.B.E., Chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd., so aptly staled recently, ‘The man who knows where he is going is the one who is most likely to arrive.’ One might venture to expand this statement by adding that he is still more likely to arrive if the cluttering debris of inefficient methods and movements are cleared away.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

It has often been said that a great part of the strength of Aslib lies in the fact that it brings together those whose experience has been gained in many widely differing fields but who have a common interest in the means by which information may be collected and disseminated to the greatest advantage. Lists of its members have, therefore, a more than ordinary value since they present, in miniature, a cross‐section of institutions and individuals who share this special interest.