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Employees often expect an emphasis on financial aspects to be predominant when their employers choose a fund management company for the investment of employees’ pension fund deposits. By contrast, in an attempt to appear as socially responsible company managers may emphasize social responsibility (SR) in pension fund choices. The purpose of this paper is to examine to what extent managers for small- and medium-sized companies emphasize SR vs expected returns when choosing investment managers for their employees’ pension funds.

A conjoint experiment among 276 Norwegian SMEs’ decision makers examines their trade-offs between social and financial goals in their choice of employees’ pension management. Furthermore, the study examines how the companies’ decision makers’ characteristics influence their pension fund management choices.

The findings show that the employers placed the greatest weight to suppliers providing funds adhering to socially responsible investment (SRI) practices, followed by the suppliers’ corporate brand credibility, the funds’ expected return, and the suppliers’ management fees. Second, employers with investment expertise emphasized expected returns and downplayed SR in their choice, whereas employers with stated CSR-strategies downplayed expected return and emphasized SR.

Choice of supplier to manage employees’ pension funds relates to a general discussion on whether companies should do well – maximizing value, or do good, – maximizing corporate SR. In this study, doing well means maximizing expected returns and minimizing costs of the pension investments, whereas doing good means emphasizing SRI in this choice. Unfortunately, the employees might pay a price for their companies’ ethicality as moral considerations may conflict with maximizing the employees’ pension fund value.

The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of pension fund managers investment thinking when confronted with challenging investment decisions. The study focuses on the theoretical question of how dual thinking processes in experts’ investment decision-making emerge. This question has attracted interest in economic psychology but has not yet been answered. Here, it is explored in the context of pension funds.

The sample included 22 pension fund managers. The authors explored their decision-making by applying the critical incident interview technique, which entailed collecting investment decisions that fund managers retrieved from recent memory (Flanagan, 1954). Questions concerned the investment situation, the decision-making process and the challenges and uncertainties the fund managers faced.

Many of the 61 critical incidents examined concerned challenging (mostly stock) investments based on extensive analysis (e.g. reliance on external analysts for advice; analysis of massive amounts of hard company and stock market information; scrutiny of company reports and personal meetings with CEOs). However, fund managers to a high degree based their decisions on soft information judgments such as experience and qualitative judgements of teams. The authors found heuristics, intuitive thinking, biases (sunk cost effects) and social influences in investment decision-making.

The sample is small and not randomly selected.

The authors suggest anti-bias training and better acquaintance with human forecasting limitations for pension fund managers.

Pension fund managers’ investment thinking has not previously been investigated. The authors show the types of investment situations in which analytical and intuitive thinking and biases occur.

This study aims to explore the views of pension beneficiaries and fund managers regarding greater involvement and investment autonomy and the attitudes toward diverse responsible investment criteria. The conventional form of investing is usually vulnerable to high financial market volatility events and financial crises, and most importantly, it has proven insufficient in addressing important social issues. A newly introduced investment culture known as impact investing strives for social gains in the long term rather than the maximization of financial returns by aiming to tackle social problems. However, some in the field claim that implementing such investment policies compromises the fiduciary responsibility of pension funds’ trustees to manage trust funds in the best interest of beneficiaries.

This study uses qualitative methods to explore the perception of proposed pension policies, such as beneficiaries’ greater involvement in determining pension investment policies that can have a positive long-term impact on their lives and on the provision of investment autonomy. For this purpose, the study investigates beneficiaries’ positions regarding responsible investment criteria from a freedom-of-choice perspective. The study sample consists of members and managers of a Dutch pension administrative organization with a cooperative structure. Three semi-structured, homogeneous discussions with focus groups containing between seven and nine participants each are conducted. The data are coded both deductively and inductively, following the framework approach, which is a qualitative data analysis method.

Participants demonstrate positive attitudes toward greater involvement and freedom of choice. However, the findings also indicate that members and pension fund managers have different views regarding responsible investment criteria. Members have more favorable attitudes toward responsible investment than do managers.

This research is limited to focus group discussions with managers and members in the Dutch healthcare sector.

How little the current pension system matches people’s investment preferences is a matter of concern, and the main implications of this research thus center upon designing a more democratic pension system for the future. Greater involvement by pension fund beneficiaries, whose roles are currently limited, would help legitimize responsible investing. This research implies that pension policies should be designed to align with the preferences of pension fund beneficiaries and be accompanied by diverse intervention strategies.

Pension reforms that encourage pension beneficiaries to exert greater influence in determining pension policy will help shrink the democratic deficit in collective pensions.

This study contributes to the literature on pension fund governance and long-term responsible investing by examining the attitudes toward impact and sustainable investments and by making suggestions for future research. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the attitudes of pension fund participants toward targeted impact investments.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze investor reactions to ethical screening by pension plan managers.

The author presents a sample consisting of data corresponding to 573 pension plans in relation to such aspects as financial performance, inception date, asset size, number of participants, custodial and management fees, and whether their managers adopt ethical screening or give part of their profits to social projects. On this data the author implements the fixed effects panel data model proposed by Vogelsang (2012).

The results obtained indicate that investors/consumers prefer traditional or solidarity pension plans to ethical pension plans. Furthermore, the findings show that ethical investors/consumers are more (less) sensitive to positive (negative) lagged returns than caring and traditional consumers, causing traditional consumers to contribute to pension plans that they already own.

The author does not know what types of environmental, social and corporate governance criteria have been adopted by ethical pension plan managers and the weight given to each of these criteria for selecting the stock of the firms in their portfolios that could influence in the investors’ behaviour.

The results obtained in the current paper show that investors invest less money in ethical pension plans than in traditional and solidarity pension plans; this could be due to the lack of information for their part. To solve this, management companies could increase the transparency about their corporate social responsibility (CSR) investments to encourage investors to invest in ethical products so these lead to raising CSR standards in companies, and therefore, sustainable development.

The Spanish socially responsible investment retail market is still at an early phase of development, and regulators should promote it in order to encourage firms to adopt business activities that take into account societal concerns.

This paper provides new evidence in a field little analysed. This paper contributes to the existing literature by focusing on examining the behaviour of pension funds investors whose investment time horizon is in the long-term while previous literature focus on analysing behaviour of mutual fund investors whose investment time horizon is in the short/medium term what could cause different investors’ behaviour.

This study aims to examine how the governance structure of the private pension system of Turkey affects the extent of agency problems through a qualitative exploratory analysis of the pension sector employees’ perspectives.

This study is based on qualitative exploratory research, which includes semi-structured interviews with 13 pension sector employees to investigate their perspectives on agency problems within Turkey’s private pension system. Data from interviews are analyzed by using the thematic content analysis method.

This study shows us that agency problems are prevalent in Turkey's private pension system, especially in the relations between pension company employees and participants. This study highlights four vulnerabilities of governance structure: the incapacity of governance structure to prevent pension companies as institutional agents from risky operations and transactions, the ability of local capital groups to use their controlling power for effecting fund management operations, the incapacity of the governance structure to prevent the employment of agents with inadequate qualifications, the lack of proper legal and regulatory framework for ensuring sufficient information disclosure to participants during contract-making and fund selection processes.

Previous research on the agency problems in the private pension schemes mostly investigated the issue from the viewpoint of participants. Thus, exploring agency problems from the agents’ point of view will be a contribution to the literature while illuminating the underlying structural problems within the system.

This paper evaluates the risk-adjusted returns, selectivity, market timing skills and persistence of the performance of Nigerian pension funds.

Annual return data of 23 pension funds that operated in Nigeria between 2018 and 2022 were obtained from the National Pension Commission (PenCom). Risk-adjusted return was appraised using the Treynor ratio, Sharpe ratio and Jensen alpha, while the Treynor–Mazuy and Henriksson–Merton multiple regression models were applied to decompose selective and timing skills. Performance persistence was assessed using the contingency table and rank correlation models.

Evidence shows that pension funds deliver excess risk-adjusted returns and exhibit selective skills. However, the evidence does not support the presence of timing skills, and there is overwhelming evidence that good (bad) performance does not repeat.

An evaluation of the investment performance of pension funds is crucial for ensuring the financial stability of retirees, maintaining economic stability and making informed investment decisions. It serves the interests of pensioners, pension fund managers, regulators and the broader economy. Our evidence that pension funds generate positive excess returns is a departure from most of the literature on managed funds. We recommend that more Nigerians should leverage the pension fund industry to grow their wealth and prepare for retirement.

This study, to our knowledge, is the first to appraise all the key facets of the investment performance of pension funds in the Nigerian context.

Pension funds are demanding increasingly more information about the levels of corporate social responsibility achieved by companies through the use of corporate social responsibility reports to select which firms’ stocks to invest in. This could improve or reduce the financial performance achieved by pension plans. Therefore, this chapter examines the financial performance obtained by equity pension plans, distinguishing between solidarity pension plans, ethical pension plans and conventional pension plans.

We use a sample of 153 individual system pension plans (129 conventional pension plans, 6 solidarity pension plans and 18 ethical pension plans). Using these sample data, we implement the robust random effects panel data methodology.

The results show that ethical pension plans perform similarly to traditional pension plans, while solidarity pension plans significantly outperform conventional pension plans.

We do not know what weights managers give to environmental, social and corporate governance criteria, which may influence the financial performance of pension plans.

The results of this study could be relevant for pension plan managers that may be considering the integration of ethical screening in their management strategies in order to offer differentiated products and for investors who would like to invest in ethical pension plans without compromising their financial performance.

Previous studies have analysed the financial performance obtained by traditional and ethical funds, but in this chapter we compare the financial performance of traditional, solidarity and ethical pension plans.

The choice of accounting methods is critical in measuring the performance and sustainability of a public defined benefit pension (DBP) plan, and such measurement has an impact on the effectiveness of the entire pension system. Prior literature rarely discusses the choice and rationale of the accounting assumptions for public DBP plans. This study fills the gap by investigating whether crucial plan characteristics, including operational performance, financial health, sponsor fiscal stress, and audit quality, are associated with the accounting assumptions of public DBP plans.

The sample includes 1,170 plan-years from the intersection of the Center for Retirement Research and public DBPs' annual financial reports for the years 2001–2013. This study develops regression models to examine the relationship between the characteristics of public DBP practices and DBP accounting choices.

The empirical results show that the public DBPs that have better investment performance, higher funding status, less fiscal stress, and that are audited by Big 4 accounting firms are more likely to adopt conservative accounting choices.

The study documents the impact of crucial pension plan characteristics on public DBP managers' accounting choices, which were not extensively discussed in pension literature. The findings help us understand the rationale for employing different accounting treatments in the context of public pension fund practices. In addition, the study sheds light on policy implications for the future reform of public pension regulations.

The aim of this paper is to propose and analyse policies capable of generating left‐skewed pension distributions. Such policies can deliver large pension values with high probability and hence are of interest to practical fund managers.

The paper uses a computational method capable of solving stochastic optimal control problems. The optimal strategies obtained through the method are used to simulate dynamic portfolio management.

The paper finds that optimisation of locally non‐concave performance measures has produced left‐skewed payoff distributions of small VaR and CVaR. The distributions remain left‐skewed for relatively large values of the diffusion parameter.

On the basis of the findings, it would seem beneficial for real‐world fund managers to implement this kind of optimising “cautious‐relaxed” policy.

A novel non‐concave performance measure has been proposed in the paper to describe a portfolio manager's aim. The computed “cautious‐relaxed” policies have been shown to realise this aim.

Pension funds are rapidly acquiring voting control of UK quoted companies. Who, if anybody, should have the legal right to use the votes attached to pension fund shareholdings — pension fund managers, employees, employee representatives, members of the TUC, members of the Government, civil servants, or perhaps members of a stakeholders' council? This article sketches a few scenarios.