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This paper seeks to report original research examining how effectively board members of occupational pension trusts administer pension plan assets on behalf of their respective members. The concept of the concerned lay board member (the “prudent person”) is increasingly under attack from the media, government and professional bodies. The proposition is that lay members should be replaced by professionals. Aims to explore the prudence vs professionalism theme through an examination of trustee profile, trustee financial competence and trustee performance effectiveness.

The study adopts demographic theory from the perspective that group demographics are a critical focus of analysis due to their potent impact on organisational outcomes. A qualitative approach was initially pursued in order to capture trustee views which formed the platform for the second quantitative phase of the study.

The study concludes that lay trustees display comparable capacity to professional trustees and emerge as equally able to positively respond to the future challenges facing pension boards.

The study highlights that HR practitioners can make a significant impact on the selection and development of pension board trustees.

Rather than continuing with the unhelpful, historically based distinction between lay and professional pension board trustees, this original study identifies the growing complexities of managing pension trusts, whilst emphasising the capabilities required to pursue innovative investment practice in the future. This paper is likely to be of value to researchers in the areas of board and pension trust performance, fund trustees, actuaries, trust fund managers, employee benefits consultancies, the Treasury and HR professionals.

Behavioral finance research has almost exclusively investigated the decision making of lay individuals, mostly ignoring more sophisticated institutional investors. The purpose of this paper is to better understand the relatively unexplored field of investment decisions made by pension fund trustees, an important subset of institutional investors, and identify future avenues of further exploration.

This paper starts by setting out the landscape in which pension fund trustees operate and make their decisions, followed by a literature review of the extant behavioral finance research applicable to similar situations.

Despite receiving training and accumulating experience in financial markets, these are limited and sparse; therefore, pension fund trustees are unlikely to be immune from behavioral biases. Trustees make decisions in groups, are heavily reliant on advice and make decisions on behalf of others. Research in those areas has uncovered many inefficiencies. It is still unknown how this specific context can affect the psychological effects on their decisions.

Given how much influence trustees’ decisions have on asset allocation and by extension in financial markets, this is a surprising state of affairs. Research in behavioral finance has had a marked influence on policy in the past and so we anticipate that exploring the decisions made within pension funds may have wide ramifications for the industry.

As far as the authors are aware, no behavioral research has empirically tested pension fund trustees’ decisions to investigate how the combination of group decisions, advice and surrogacy influence their decisions and, ultimately, the sustainability of our pensions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the public pension governance practices on the public defined benefit pension (DBP) fund performance.

To provide a holistic evaluation of public DBP performance, this study first employs the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach to construct a relative performance measure that simultaneously takes into account the association between investment inputs and performance outputs across DBPs in our sample. A DEA regression model is then constructed to empirically examine the impact of pension governance on public DBP performance.

Using 1,544 hand-collected observations in the USA from 2002 to 2013, the findings show that the public DBP plans with a small board, appointed board trustees, and a separate investment council exhibit better performance.

The effectiveness of pension governance has increasingly drawn public attention, as it affects the performance of the public DBP plans that especially matter to public employees. The empirical findings of this research offer insights into recent calls to reexamine public DBP management practices and to carry out related public pension fund policy reforms.

The examination of public DBP governance practices in this study enriches the governance literature, particularly research on public pension funds, by using public sector data. Second, by applying the DEA method to evaluate the relative performance of public DBP funds, this study obtains a more comprehensive analysis of the public pension governance.

This article aims to highlight the gap between the legal responsibilities and the practice of pension fund trustees in Ireland.

The paper relies on primary and secondary data analysis of trustee practice and enforcement cases to highlight the gap between law and practice.

The article finds that there is an inconsistency between legal requirement and practice in the calibre of trustee and trustee training across Irish occupational pension schemes. This has adverse consequences for pension governance and performance.

The findings raise the question as to whether there should be mandatory qualifications for trustees or mandatory standardised trustee training in a prescribed format, with which trustees should comply. It also questions whether there should be a governance code for trustees to ensure a minimum standard or target level of competence and good governance on the part of pension scheme trustees.

There is a distinct lack of emphasis in the literature and in practice on the inconsistency between the extent of the responsibilities which trustees ultimately carry, and the legal exposure this potentially creates for trustees who unduly rely on other trustees or third parties in the trustee decision making process.

This paper describes the legal background to the Maxwell scandal in which about £500m of pension fund money was stolen, analyses some of the supposed flaws in the current arrangements for the regulation of pension schemes, and suggests possible revisions to the current law, anticipating the report of the Goode Committee on Pensions Law Reform, due in late 1993.

While there has been much discussion about pension regulation and decision making in relation to pension trusteeship, there appears to be little research on women and men who take up opportunities to become pension trustees. Thus the focus of this research is to explore what it means to be a female or male pension trustee in “a man's world”.

Acker's influential model for the gendering of organisational processes and its subsequent development to acknowledge the intersection of multiple inequalities such as gender and class is used as a tool to provide a micro‐analysis of men's and women's interpretation of being a pension trustee.

The persistence of homosocial reproduction around managerial competences in pension board activity helps explain men's and women's differing experiences within male‐dominated pension boardrooms.

The paper focuses on a small but diverse sample of pension trustees and further research is needed to explore further why pension trustees take on this challenging and complex role.

UK legislation about member representation on pension boards has the potential to bring new female candidates to the board. This paper gives an insight into what this means for a diverse group of pension trustees.

THE GOVERNMENT'S White Paper, “Strategy for Pensions” and the consequent legislation, which will be implemented this year, aims to introduce the principle and practice of guaranteeing employees minimum standards of pension provision and minimum benefits for their dependants. The State will provide a flat basic pension which will be constantly revised in line with average earnings and — on top of this — a second tier pension related to pay. This second tier pension can be provided instead by means of contracted‐out private occupational schemes. The conditions for contracting out and the problems of introducing an occupational scheme confronts employers with challenging policy decisions and major administrative burdens. This survey by leading specialists in the pensions field identifies the alternatives and points the way to an effective scheme for your company.

This paper aims to conduct an empirical analysis of subnational laws of the USA that require public pension funds to divest from companies that are in business with Cuba, Iran, Syria, and Sudan and explores whether public fund officials may be in violation of their fiduciary duty responsibilities toward pension system beneficiaries as they execute state-mandated divestment schemes.

A database search was conducted for specific federal laws, presidential executive orders, and departments, offices, and terminology relevant to the topic of the research to explore the extent by which states employ public pension divestment regimes inspired by the federal governments designation of the four countries labeled as state sponsors of terrorism. Quantitative and financial calculations were used to conduct the cost analysis of divestment laws.

Divestment laws are costly for the beneficiaries. In the majority of the states that have divestment laws, the public funds, rather than the states, must cover the losses associated with divestment, resulting in pension fund trustees and managers having to take action that are in violation of their fiduciary duty responsibilities.

The study recommends a major overhaul of the current divestment laws.

Divestment legislations must be revised as they cause a divergence of interests between state-driven political gestures, the fiduciary responsibilities of pension system trustees, and the financial interests of the beneficiaries.

This is the first study that recommends specific legislative action that would resolve the divergence of interests between state-driven political gestures, the fiduciary responsibilities of pension system trustees, and the financial interests of the beneficiaries.