June 2019

25Jun

Climate Impact Pledge: Tackling the climate emergency

By Meryam Omi Public concern about the danger posed by climate change has reached unprecedented levels. More than a million students have walked out of classes worldwide, while protests have been held across dozens of countries, to call for swift action from governments1. This is no fad. The world is truly in the midst of a climate emergency, which could have drastic consequences for markets, companies and, therefore, our clients’ assets. With the UN warning that there is little over...

June 25, 2019
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07Jun

U.S. Public Pension Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for Trustees and Investment Staff

By Von M Hughes In an ever-changing financial and political landscape, your job as a public pension fiduciary continues to get more difficult. Now, you have the help you need. U.S. Public Pension Handbook is the only one-stop resource that covers the various areas of public pension policy design, governance, investment management, infrastructure, accounting, and law. This comprehensive guide presents critical data, information, and insights in topic-specific, easy-to-understand ways--providing the knowledge you need to elevate...

June 7, 2019
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May 2019

31May

Ensuring Retirement Security with Simple GLIDeS

By Adam Kobor, Arun Muralidhar There is a growing retirement crisis and most of the focus has been on the fact that individuals are not saving enough for retirement, may not have access to pension schemes, or are financially illiterate. More critically, assets/financial products available to investors, may not be appropriate for the typical individual saving for retirement. The goal of retirement is to try to guarantee a target level of income ideally from retirement till death. Current glide...

May 31, 2019
Articles, Investing, Pension design, Savings, , ,
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31May

50 States of Gray: An Innovative Solution to the Defined Contribution Retirement Crisis

By Arun Muralidhar Another retirement crisis is looming as one-third of private-sector, typically poor and unsophisticated workers, probably have little to no pension security. The fifty states have decided to enact reforms, but they are unwilling to assume any liability. Effective reform should ensure a target, guaranteed, inflation/standard-of-living-indexed retirement income through death. The book proposes a four-step reform process that articulates roles, responsibilities, and sequencing of steps to effectively address the looming retirement crisis. Current reform models potentially expose...

May 31, 2019
Books, Investing, Pension design, , ,
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24May

Pension Fund Risk Management: Financial and Actuarial Modeling

By Marco Micocci, Greg N Gregoriou, Giovanni Batista Masala As pension fund systems decrease and dependency ratios increase, risk management is becoming more complex in public and private pension plans. Pension Fund Risk Management: Financial and Actuarial Modeling sheds new light on the current state of pension fund risk management and provides new technical tools for addressing pension risk from an integrated point of view. Divided into four parts, the book first presents the correct measurement of risk...

May 24, 2019
Books, Investing, Pension design, ,
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24May

Fundamentals of Investment: A Practitioner’s Guide (English Edition)

By Brian O'Loughlin, Frank O'Brien Post the Financial Crash, the role of regulation and the impact of regulation on all aspects of the financial industry has broadened and intensified. This book offers a comprehensive review of the operations of the industry post-financial crisis from a variety of perspectives. This new edition builds upon the authors’ predecessor book, Fundamentals of Investment: An Irish Perspective. The core of the original text is retained particularly concerning fundamental concepts such as discounted...

May 24, 2019
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April 2019

15Apr

Achieving Investment Excellence: A Practical Guide for Trustees of Pension Funds, Endowments and Foundations

By Kees Koedijk, Alfred Slager, Jaap Van Dam Achieving Investment Excellence offers trustees and asset managers a comprehensive handbook for improving the quality of their investments. With a stated goal of substantially and sustainably improving annual returns, this book clarifies and demystifies important concepts surrounding trustee duties and responsibilities, investment strategies, analysis, evaluation and much more. Low interest rates are making the high cost of future pension payouts fraught with tension, even as the time and knowledge required to manage these funds...

April 15, 2019
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08Apr

Liability-Driven Investment: From Analogue to Digital, Pensions to Robo-Advice

By Dan Tammas-Hastings Understand the investment template that dominates the pension industry Liability-Driven Investment is the practitioner's guide to this increasingly popular investment template. Already the dominant framework for pension schemes in Europe and the UK, the LDI market is expected to grow significantly with the shift from Defined Benefit to Defined Contribution, and then into Digital Asset Management -- or Robo-Advice. With an aging population and significant under-saving globally, more and more finance professionals will need to know how to work...

April 8, 2019
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08Apr

Corporate Governance in Banking and Investor Protection: From Theory to Practice

By Belen Diaz Diaz, Samuel O Idowu, Philip Molyneux This book explores the status quo of corporate governance in banking and investor protection from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Bringing together original conclusions with a regional and international focus, it provides a timely and comprehensive overview of the effectiveness of corporate governance in the financial sector and an assessment of investor protection. It also includes a number of examples and case studies to illustrate the findings. The book compares corporate...

April 8, 2019
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08Apr

ESG Investing: From Sin Stocks to Smart Beta

By Fabio Alessandrini (University of Lausanne; Banque Cantonale Vaudoise) & Eric Jondeau (University of Lausanne - Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC Lausanne); Swiss Finance Institute) Research on socially responsible investment in equity markets initially focused on sin stocks. Since then, the availability of data has been extended substantially and now covers environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria. Using ESG scores of firms belonging to the MSCI World universe, we measure the impact of score-based exclusion on both passive investment...

April 8, 2019
Articles, Investing, System Sustainability,
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