October 2026
16Oct

The Duration Gap: Value-at-Risk, Interest-Rate Swaps and the 2026 Losses of Chile’s Most Conservative Pension Fund

By Alfredo Merlet Between January and September 2026, Fund E, the most conservative of Chile's five mandatory pension fund types, lost about ten per cent in real terms, its second-worst result on record, while the funds' positions in foreign interest-rate derivatives swung to a reported valuation loss of about US$7.7 billion. This article asks why standard Value-at-Risk (VaR) measures did not warn of the loss. Using daily unit values for the seven pension fund administrators (AFPs) from January 2015 to...

October 16, 2026
Articles, Investment, , , ,
Read more...
09Oct

2026 Global Climate Investing Survey

By Lucian Peppelenbos Investor support for prioritizing climate change is rising again, as concerns around energy security accelerate the renewable energy transition, and as the physical effects of global warming are increasingly felt, the Robeco Global Climate Investing Survey 2026 shows. The sixth annual survey of 300 investors shows they are realistic about climate targets, with most forecasting a ‘too little, too late’ scenario that cannot achieve the Paris goals. Yet there is also resilience, as most investors are still prepared...

October 9, 2026
Books, Books, Investment, Reports, , ,
Read more...

September 2026
25Sep

Natural Buyers? Pension Funds and Treasury Exposure

By Aleksandar Andonov, Kristy Jansen & Joshua D. Rauh Long-maturity Treasury issuance reduces government rollover risk but depends on investors with structural demand for duration. We examine whether U.S. public pension funds, a $7 trillion sector, provide such demand, as is often presumed given their liabilities. Using security-level holdings, we show that Treasuries account for only 6% of pension assets and that total Treasury exposure, including derivatives, has a maturity of 8.0 years, only 1.3 years longer than marketable Treasury...

September 25, 2026
Articles, Investment, , , ,
Read more...
11Sep

What Drives Institutional Asset Allocation? Survey Evidence from Pension Fund Advisors

By Carolina Salva & Tim Alexander Kroencke We survey 28 leading Swiss pension fund consultants and asset managers to understand the factors and their ranking driving institutional asset allocation decisions. The risk tolerance of pension fund boards, target returns, and risk-free rates emerge as the most influential factors, while traditional portfolio theory predictors such as expected returns, volatility or individual risk aversion show limited practical relevance. Finally, we find that individual risk aversion of beneficiaries plays a limited role. Our...

September 11, 2026
Articles, Investment, ,
Read more...
04Sep

Global pension asset allocations and debt markets

By Ding Ding, Xiang Fang, Bryan Hardy & Karen K. Lewis The pension sector is an important investor group in global financial markets and a key holder of government and corporate debt. This article examines the evolution of pension fund asset allocations around the globe and documents two important structural changes. First, pension investors have shifted portfolio share allocations away from fixed income securities. This trend is robust across Defined Contribution (DC) and Defined Benefit (DB) programs as well as...

September 4, 2026
Books, Books, Investment, Reports, , ,
Read more...

August 2026
28Aug

Optimal Investment for Retirement with Intergenerational Benchmarking

By Luke Servat & Antoon Pelsser Countries have demonstrated a tendency to switch their second pillar toward defined contribution plans, increasing the market-sensitivity of pensions. This can lead to large differences across generations within a pension fund, as otherwise similar cohorts may experience different market conditions during accumulation. In this paper, we investigate how each cohort should invest if the goal is to reduce the likelihood of unlucky generations, in the presence of equity, interest-rate and annuity-conversion risk. We do...

August 28, 2026
Articles, Investment, ,
Read more...

July 2026
03Jul

How Rational Is AI Investment Advice? Risk-Return Relevance in Artificial Intelligence (AI) Investments

By Nanying Lin, Oscar Gilbert & Tianxiang Chu Textbook finance theories indicate that investors demand risk premia from risky assets as compensation for risk and for hedging against future unfavorable economic states. We design a comprehensive study to examine whether investment advice generated by artificial intelligence (AI) reflects a coherent risk–return pattern in investment decision-making. We find that AI advises investors to increase stock investments when return increases and reduce stock allocations when stock volatility increases. However, AI ignores the...

July 3, 2026
Articles, Investment, , , ,
Read more...

June 2026
12Jun

Ambition Under Pressure: Analytical Leadership vs. Strategic Hesitation

By Amy Owens The report, Ambition Under Pressure: Analytical Leadership vs. Strategic Hesitation, examines what the climate risk strategy of Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), manager of Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, reveals about the way financial markets are pricing climate risk. It finds that NBIM has built one of the most advanced climate and nature risk frameworks among global asset owners. Its internal modelling goes beyond many market-standard tools, enabling the fund to assess systemic physical climate risk, climate-nature interdependencies...

June 12, 2026
Books, Books, Investment, Reports, , , ,
Read more...

May 2026
22May

Pension Fund Investment and Firm Innovation

By Cédric Schneider, Dario Pozzoli & David Pinkus We use a unique database on domestic pension fund investment to analyze the relationship between pension fund investment and innovation within Danish firms. We find a significant positive association between pension fund investment and various measures of innovation, including green technologies for climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, this relationship is much weaker in highly competitive industries,suggesting that pension funds encourage innovation by monitoring and holding managers accountable. Our analysis also shows...

May 22, 2026
Articles, Investment, , , ,
Read more...
22May

Investment Decisions of Defined Benefit Pension Plans

By Zhichuan Frank Li, Jun Wang & Yuqi Zhang This paper examines the determinants of defined benefit (DB) pension plan investment decisions of U.S. corporations with the largest 100 DB plans (Milliman 100 companies). We test two contradicting theories on DB plans. The risk-management theory indicates that firms tend to reduce risk in their pension investments when facing high risk, and the risk-shifting theory predicts the opposite because the funds’ downside risk is hedged by federal government insurance. We find...

May 22, 2026
Articles, Investment, System Sustainability, , , , ,
Read more...