March 2025
14Mar

2024 financial services monitor know better do better

By Old Mutual The key objective of the Old Mutual Financial Services Monitor is to provide a deep understanding of the working Ghanaian market, uncovering financial attitudes, perceptions, and behaviour in the informal and formal sectors. What makes Old Mutual’s Financial Services Monitor unique, is that its core objective is to support Old Mutual’s drive to champion the financial well-being of Ghanaians. This is aligned to Old Mutual’s overall purpose of becoming our customers’ first choice to sustain, grow and protect...

March 14, 2025
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February 2025
14Feb

Politics Before Pensions: How New ESG Rules Expose Public Pension System Vulnerabilities

By Danilo Risteski As some of the largest institutional investors in the United States, public pension funds wield considerable power over investment decisions. A recent trend highlights this extraordinary power: state pension funds have started exploiting their retirees’ pensions to force investment companies to invest in accordance with their respective states’ political priorities. Nowhere is this trend more obvious than in the environmental, social, and governance field. On one hand, states like Maine have passed legislation prohibiting public pension funds...

February 14, 2025
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January 2025
31Jan

Pensions investment outlook 2025: U.S. policy uncertainty clouds road ahead

By Investment Managers The coming year will likely be characterized by three main drivers: the U.S.’s politically driven polices, structural economic 1 The implicit yield curve based on the floating rates associated with an interest rate swap. weaknesses and political uncertainty in Europe, and China’s restructuring of its troubled property market. Overall, our forecasts suggest global growth looks set to continue its 2024 pace of 3.2% in 2025, before easing in 2026 to 2.9%. This outlook could be compounded by the implementation...

January 31, 2025
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24Jan

The Role of ‘Green’ Investors in Reducing Corporate Carbon Emissions

By National Bureau of Economic Research The researchers categorize public pension funds based on the political affiliation of the leaders who control them. Those under Democratic control, either through governance or board trusteeship, were labeled “green.” Those under Republican control were labeled “non-green.” The researchers assume that Democrats generally favor carbon emission reductions more than Republicans. They study emissions data from 2010–21 for 5,241 facilities across 685 publicly traded companies, along with data on pension fund stock holdings for 24 of...

January 24, 2025
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10Jan

Sustainable Investing

By Lubos Pastor, Robert F. Stambaugh & Lucian A. Taylor We review the literature on sustainable investing, focusing on financial effects. First, we examine the effects of investor tastes on portfolio tilts and asset prices in a simple equilibrium setting. We establish novel connections, including a direct relation between the green portfolio tilt and the greenium. We also relate our framework to prior modeling of divestment. Finally, we review evidence related to the main concepts from our theoretical analysis, including the greenium, green...

January 10, 2025
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December 2024
13Dec

Pulse Report. Afire International Investor Survey

By Afire International Investor Survey   As an extension of housing concerns in the US, trends in the insurance industry can sometimes serve as portents, or as evidence. At the junction between the global, environmental effects of climate change and the frequently counterintuitive logic of homeowners, renters, and consumers in the US, the question of insurance is best understood as an analogy. For example, earlier in 2024, AFIRE asked investors if they agreed or disagreed with the sentiment that the industry...

December 13, 2024
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13Dec

Private Equity for Pension Plans? Evaluating Private Equity Performance from an Investor’s Perspective

By Arthur Korteweg, Stavros Panageas & Anand Systla We evaluate private equity (PE) performance using investor-specific stochastic discount factors, and examine whether investors could benefit from changing their allocation to PE. Plans invest in PE funds with higher average risk-adjusted performance. This is mainly due to access to successful PE managers, not superior selection skill. Decomposing returns into risk-compensation and "alpha", we find that some plans obtain higher PE returns by taking more risk without earning higher, and in some cases earning lower,...

December 13, 2024
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November 2024
29Nov

Chinese Pension Insurance, Risk Attitudes, and Household Asset Allocation

By Hua Chen, Han Xiao, Yunxiao Guo & Ding Li Optimising household asset allocation is vital for expanding domestic demand in developing countries. This study uses 2017, 2019, and 2021 China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) data to explore pension insurance's effect on asset allocation among Chinese households. Key findings include that higher pension balances encourage investments in riskier assets. Specifically, for every 10% increase in pension account balances, the likelihood of investing in the risk asset market rises by 5%, and...

November 29, 2024
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October 2024
16Oct

Who Owns the City? Pension Fund Capitalism and the Parkdale Rent Strike

By Jamie Shilton Canadian public pension funds play an increasingly significant role as institutional investors, including in the domestic residential property market. Some scholars have suggested that pension fund investments of this kind result in a form of public ownership, sometimes characterized as “pension fund socialism.” However, the actual character of pension fund investment in Canada is much more akin to a financialized pension fund capitalism, with public pension funds adopting investment strategies consistent with private financial market actors. In...

October 16, 2024
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11Oct

Beyond the Status Quo: A Critical Assessment of Lifecycle Investment Advice

By Aizhan Anarkulova, Scott Cederburg & Michael S. O'Doherty We challenge two central tenets of lifecycle investing: (i) investors should diversify across stocks and bonds and (ii) the young should hold more stocks than the old. An even mix of 50% domestic stocks and 50% international stocks held throughout one’s lifetime vastly outperforms age-based, stock-bond strategies in building wealth, supporting retirement consumption, preserving capital, and generating bequests. These findings are based on a lifecycle model that features dynamic processes for...

October 11, 2024
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