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Purpose: With this study, the authors aim to analyze and highlight the financial performance of pension funds (public and private) and their impact on the economic growth of The Organisation for Economic Co-­operation and Development (OECD) countries, while taking into account the effect of market capitalization, inflation, and public debt.

Methodology: To carry out this analysis, the authors subjected our secondary data (derived from published in the annual reports of the OECD, the World Bank and the IMF) to econometric tests, specifically linear regression, random effect, fixed effect, the Hausman–Taylor Regression, the Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE), the Generalized Method of Moments – Arellano – Bond Estimation (GMM) and carried out an analysis of linear trends through the historical method and comparative method.

Findings: Based on the empirical results of this study, the authors conclude that the assets of public and private pension funds have positively affected the economic growth of OECD countries (2002–2018).

Practical Implications: This study provides an overview of the functioning of pension systems in OECD countries as well as the effects of these pension funds on their economic growth. Moreover, it provides additional new knowledge for governments and policymakers in these countries and a good source of information for all employees (whether public or private), on the quality and standards of living after retirement.

Significance: The importance of this study rests on the fact that OECD countries have a highly developed economy and have high-performance financial markets. Therefore, this highlights the importance of investments by pension funds in their financial markets for economic growth and for the indirect effects caused on their economies.

This study seeks to measure the level of responsible investment (RI) disclosure of the world's largest pension funds.

The public disclosure of environmental, social and governance factors by the world's largest pension funds reflect their genuine commitment to this new investment paradigm. The UNPRI criterion is employed to measure the level of public disclosure. One hour was allocated to every asset owner's web site to search and collect public information.

Overall, the level of public disclosure of RI activities is not prolific. The study is negatively influenced by North American pension funds who dominate this sample. Public disclosure practices are positive for European funds. The size of funds under management positively influences the public disclosure and reflects their leadership role in the industry.

Limitations include: the largest pension funds are dominated by North American funds and reflect the impact of fund size. The results are from the largest pension funds and may not be representative of the entire industry; the positive findings from European funds reflect a material subset of the global asset owners; and, we do not engage directly with the funds in question. Measurements are sourced from public disclosure.

The lack of public disclosure of RI by North American funds suggests that these institutions do not believe that it is important to investors. It suggests that these asset owners have not yet been exposed to the same influences as European funds. Given that North American funds together own substantial interests in listed corporations, they are much more important to influence than corporations.

This paper analyzes the impact of economic downturns on the revenue and expense sides of city financing for the period 2003 to 2009 using a convenience sample of the audited end of year financial reports for thirty midsized US cities. The analysis focuses on whether and how quickly and how extensively revenue and spending directions from past years are altered by recessions. A seven year series of Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) data serves to explore whether citiesʼ revenues and spending, especially the traditional property tax and core functions such as public safety and infrastructure withstood the brief 2001 and the persistent 2007 recessions? The findings point to consumption (spending) over stability (revenue minus expense) for the recession of 2007, particularly in 2008 and 2009.

Several popular and academic pieces of late have expressed concerns regarding the sustainability of public defined benefit pension funds. Since the onset of the Great Recession, concern has increased. In this paper recent arguments are analyzed in the context of three related data sets: panel data on public sector pensions spanning 2001-2009, historic asset return data, and business cycle data. Findings generally indicate that while public sector plans have suffered a difficult decade, current anxieties may be somewhat overwrought. Several remedial policies are investigated. Remedial policies, such as improving plan administration, altering portfolio allocations, and increasing both employee and employer contributions, are observed to be more promising than either freezing or closing the funds.

Examines the financial accountability implications arising from the adoption of accrual‐based accounting principles by Australia’s largest public sector employee pension fund manager, the State Authorities Superannuation Board of the Australian State of New South Wales (SASB), during its brief existence from 1988 to 1996. While the adoption of accrual‐based accounting principles increased management’s political accountability concerning the performance of SASB’s commercially‐managed asset portfolio, it reduced the level of generational accountability concerning the under‐funding of its major pension fund, the State Authorities Superannuation Scheme (the SAS). Negative political visibility associated with management’s voluntary compliance with a controversial financial reporting standard, together with government’s adoption of accrual accounting, resulted in two major changes in the SASB’s organizational structure. The impact of political visibility on the generational accountability behavior of SASB management is examined by comparing stock and flow funding trends of the SAS over time.

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 study aims to examine the solvency and performance persistence of defined benefit private and public pension plans (DBPPs) in the Republic of Congo.

The authors use the 2 × 2 contingency table approach and the time product ratio (TPR)-based cross-product ratio (CPR) on data covering ten years from 2011 to 2020, with variable funded ratios and excess returns, to determine the solvency and performance persistence of defined benefit pension plans.

The authors document a lack of solvency and performance persistence in DBPP funds. They conclude that the solvency and performance of DBPP funds are not repetitive. The previous year's private and public defined benefit pension funds’ results do not repeat in the current year. Hence, the current solvency and performance of defined benefit pension funds are not good predictors of future funds' solvency and performance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to combine solvency and performance to examine the persistence of defined benefit pension plans in sub-Saharan Africa.

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.

This paper gives an account of the growth and impact of pension funds in the United Kingdom, describing the marked growth in scheme membership and in the influence and strength of the pension funds. The consequences of that growth are discussed and attention is drawn to the problems of funding pensions in a climate of uncertainty and inflation.

Following the traditions of stakeholder salience theory, this paper aims to contend that some institutional investor activists and tactics have more power, legitimacy and urgency than others.

The author undertakes an empirical test of a saliency table looking at the effects of institutional investor heterogeneity on portfolio firm responses using ordinal logistic regression.

This study found heterogeneity for institutional investor type to drive firm responses but not tactic type raising the importance of the attributes of each type of investor activist. The author found a rank ordering of public pension plans, hedge funds and then private multiemployer funds in saliency to portfolio firms. In addition, the use of proxy-based tactics did not help or hurt each investor type. Both findings challenge prior empirical work.

The rank ordering based upon the heterogeneity of institutional investor activists and their tactical interactions are tested providing empirical evidence of the most influential activist investors and tactics in one study, which is rare in the literature.