Agency Costs Beyond Corporations: Evidence from Pension Funds
By Clemens Böhlen This paper examines the role of agency costs in pension fund performance. Grounded in corporate agency theory, it exploits institutional variation in a unique dataset on the Swiss pension system to assess how differences in monitoring incentives affect investment outcomes. Specifically, I examine the role of the sponsoring company and show that multi-employer funds underperform institutionally comparable single-employer funds by 25-31 basis points per year, in line with weaker governance incentives. Consistent with corporate agency theory, these...
