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To describe how the Pension Protection Act of 2006 (the “Pension Act”) will affect the investment of plan assets subject to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA).

Describes the redefinition of “plan assets” under the Pension Act and explains new statutory prohibited transaction exemptions in areas that include transactions between plans and service providers, cross‐trading, foreign exchange transactions, block trades, the use of electronic communications networks (ECNs), correction to reverse prohibited transactions, bonding, and investment advice.

The status of existing investors as benefit plan investors under the Pension Act should be reviewed to determine whether formerly precluded investors may now be permitted. ERISA‐related purchase, sale, and transfer restrictions currently in use will need to be reviewed and likely significantly revised to reflect the decreased breadth of “party in interest” prohibitions. Investment advisers will need to review whether they want to begin providing investment advisory services to plan participants and, if so, begin developing procedural safeguards to comply with the requirements of the Pension Act.

A useful summary of forthcoming pension legislation as it affects US pension and IRA investments, particularly in its redefinition of the circumstances under which an entity's assets are treated as “plan assets” for ERISA purposes and its new statutory exemptions from the prohibited transaction requirements of ERISA.

We study the potential effects of pension underfunding on corporate investment, financial constraints and improved employee bonding using 10 Pacific-Basin countries (including the United States, Australia, and eight Asian countries) at heterogeneous economic development stages and different regulatory environments. We document that corporate pensions are significantly underfunded in most countries of our sample in the period of 2001–2017, when interest rates were ultralow in most countries. In addition, firms from countries with stronger employee protection and more generous retirement benefits tend to show higher levels of underfunding in their defined benefit (DB) pension plans. To the extent of pension underfunding imposing constraints on corporate investment, we find that firms in these countries can face more constraints on investment when their pension is underfunded.

Looks at the role of property in pensions funds pre and post minimum funding requirement (MFR). Suggests that while property has a role as a matching asset in pension funds, this role has declined in recent years. This is partly because of poor performance but also because other asset categories can perform the role that property has played. The introduction of the MFR may make property still less attractive to pension funds because of the equity/gilt valuation benchmark. However, we expect any effect in the short term to be limited.

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.

This paper aims to present to capital market regulators (particularly in Turkey) with options for regulating the quickly expanding area of socially responsible investment (SRI).

The paper takes a public economics perspective, focusing on the social risks concomitant with equity investment, and presents options based on an economic analysis of the various regulatory options available to capital market regulators.

The paper finds that in the long run, the extent of national SRI‐related regulation will probably depend on the extent to which the social, environmental, and other risks targeted by SRI represent social risks (which can be mitigated by regulation as opposed to other policy instruments).

While Turkish private pension fund regulators should be mindful of wariness of other OECD member countries to regulate SRI, the particularity of the social risks faced by Turkish financial markets may militate for a unique national approach toward SRI regulation.

This study represents one of the first attempts to address the issue of domestic SRI regulation and to present evidence‐based conclusions in a policy oriented setting.

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 provide an overview of key issues in the governance of defined contribution pension schemes, with a focus on investment matters, and to recommend best practices.

The paper draws on the results of an online survey of the opinions of pensions professionals and on interviews with pensions professionals.

The paper finds that many employers and pension scheme trustees are reluctant to take an active role in pension scheme design and to provide support and guidance to members for fear of legal liability. Scope exists for regulators and legislators to create “safe harbour” provisions that will encourage employers and trustees to become more active in supporting members.

The paper makes a number of suggestions for best practice in the design and governance of defined contribution pension schemes, for example, in terms of the fund choice that should be offered.

The paper provides the first comprehensive review of investment issues for UK defined contribution pension plans.

Although the focus of this issue is on investment in British industry and hence we are particularly concerned with debt and shares, the transactions and holdings in these cannot be separated from the range of other financial claims, including property, that are available to investors. In consequence this article focuses on an overview of the financial system including in Section 2 a presentation of the flow of funds matrix of the financial claims that make up the system. We also examine more closely the role of the financial institutions that are part of the system by utilising the sources and uses statements for three sectors, non‐bank financial institutions, personal sector and industrial and commercial companies. Then we provide, in Section 3, a discussion of the various financial claims investors can hold. In Section 4 we give a portrayal of the portfolio disposition of each of the major types of financial institution involved in the market for company securities specifically insurance companies (life and general), pension funds, unit and investment trusts, and in Section 4 a market study is performed for ordinary shares, debentures and preference shares for holdings, net acquisitions and purchases/sales. A review of some of the empirical evidence on the financial institutions is presented in Section 5 and Section 6 is by way of a conclusion. The data series extend in the main from 1966 to 1981, though at the time of writing, some 1981 data are still unavailable. In addition, the point needs to be made that the samples have been constantly revised so that care needs to be exercised in the use of the data.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the existence of behavioral biases, disposition effect and house money effect in investment decisions of defined benefit pension funds. It investigates the determinants of portfolios by examining whether pensions display risk seeking or risk aversion behavior in reaction to prior gains and losses.

The first research question is to examine the impact of prior period’s return and αs on existing portfolio allocation in equity, debt, real estate and other assets. In order to test this relationship, four separate regressions are estimated using the pooled data. Regression helps in examining the relationship between prior gains with current allocation in four categories of assets of varying degrees of riskiness (stocks, debt, real estate and other assets). In order to investigate the second research question on whether pension funds increase (decrease) their investments in risky (safer) assets due to prior gains and αs, the four variables representing the changes in portfolio allocation for each asset class over one period are employed. These changes in allocation are regressed against the prior year’s actual return, expected return, αs and a set of control variables.

The results suggest significant negative (positive) relationship between prior positive returns and αs with portfolio allocation in risky (safer) assets. Also, there is an increased (decreased) investment in safer (risky) assets following prior period’s positive returns and αs. The findings confirm the existence of disposition effect, while there is no evidence of house money effect.

The portfolio allocation of pension plans provides unique setting to investigate the relevance of behavioral finance and examine the role of psychological biases on risk taking. This study attempts to contribute to the literature by empirically investigating whether the tenets of behavioral finance are relevant in defined benefit pension fund’s portfolio allocation decisions. Specifically, it focuses on the determinants of portfolio choices by directly investigating pension funds’ reaction to prior period’s actual as well as risk adjusted return (or αs – the difference between the actual and expected return).

The purpose of this paper is to theoretically examine the risk-taking decision of corporate defined benefits (DB) plans. The equity holders’ investment problem that is represented by the position of a vulnerable option is solved.

The simple traditional contingent claim approach is applied, which considers only the distributions of corporate cash flow, without the model expansions, such as market imperfections, needed to explain the firms’ behavior for DB plans in previous studies.

The authors find that the optimal solution to the equity holders’ DB investment problem is not an extreme corner solution such as 100 percent investment in equity funds as in the literature. Rather, the solution lies in the middle range, as is commonly observed in real-world economies.

The major value of this study is that it develops a clear mechanism for obtaining an internal solution for the equity holders’ DB investment problem and it provides the understanding that the base for corporate investment behavior for DB plans should incorporate the fact that in some cases the optimal solution is in the middle range. Therefore, the corporate risk-taking behavior of DB plans is harder to identify than the results of the empirical literature have predicted.