January 2026

Decoding Pension Funds: Sustainability Indicators for Annual Report Analysis

By Leticia Martins Medeiros, Clea Beatriz Macagnan & Rosane Maria Seibert Pension funds’ growth highlights the need to emphasize fiduciary duty and investment sustainability, considering the current and future participants’ interests (priority stakeholders) and systemic risk reduction (environmental, social, economic, and governance effects). Therefore, this study builds sustainability indicators based on the interests of pension fund stakeholders. The methodology comprised five stages: the first consisted of analyzing Annual Information Reports to create a preliminary list of indicators; the second involved...

October 2025

The Future of Retirement Security An International Comparison through the Lens of Adequacy, Sustainability, Equity and Plan Design

By Surya Kolluri, Catherine Reilly & David P. Richardson Countries around the world are considering and implementing reforms to their retirement systems for a variety of reasons, including increasing demographic and economic pressures. A key demographic driver is human longevity. For example, the average retiree can expect to spend about two decades in retirement, roughly double the time from 50 years ago. In the United States, life expectancy has risen by 17 years since the Social Security program debuted nearly 90...

Mercer CFA Institute Global Pension Index 2025

By Tim Jenkins, Nicola Mc Garel & Sarah Hudson The Mercer CFA Institute Global Pension Index benchmarks 52 retirement income systems worldwide, spotlighting both challenges and opportunities for policymakers and investors. This year’s index expands with Kuwait, Namibia, Oman, and Panama added, incorporates updated OECD data, and introduces new integrity measures for sharper insights. Systems are assessed across three pillars, adequacy, sustainability, and integrity, using more than 50 indicators. In 2025, the Netherlands, Iceland, Denmark, Singapore and Israel all achieved...

August 2025

Enhancing Financial Regulation of Green Infrastructure Investment

By Andreas (Andy) Jobst The paper examines the critical need for enhanced financial regulation to support green infrastructure investment as climate action becomes increasingly pressing. It points out that infrastructure is responsible for more than two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions and that climate-related disasters lead to annual losses of nearly one percent of GDP, with poorer countries being disproportionately affected. Green infrastructure plays a crucial role in reducing carbon footprints through renewable energy and low-emission transport, as well as...

May 2025

Sustainability reporting on pension schemes the path forward

In an era marked by growing awareness of environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations, sustainability reporting has emerged as a crucial aspect for organisations, investors and stakeholders. For pension schemes, particularly, integrating sustainability into their reporting frameworks is more than just a regulatory requirement; it’s an ethical imperative that aligns with the long-term nature of their commitments to retirees and the society. Read the complete book here

April 2025

Optimal Investment-Consumption and Retirement Choice with Labor and Pension Incomes

By Hyun Jin Jang & Seon Hwa Lee This study examines lifetime optimal investment, consumption, and retirement timing decisions under a heterogeneous consumption utility function and the presence of pension earnings. Using the duality method, we derive the optimal wealth, investment-consumption strategies, and voluntary retirement region. Through simulation analysis, we assess the impact of pensions on these decisions. Our findings highlight the critical role of pensions in retirement planning, alongside wages and labor costs. Notably, pension benefits encourage earlier voluntary...

March 2025

Considerations on ESG Investment Implementation

By Laura T. Starks Although interest in investing according to environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) standards is widespread, investment managers face a number of basic considerations with their portfolio choices. In this article, I give a high-level overview of these considerations within the context of the investor motivation: ESG values, ESG value, or both. These considerations include whether investors should exclude certain firms or use a positive tilt; how they could integrate ESG into an investment approach; the role...

July 2024

Sustainable Investing in Pensions: Top Tips for Sponsors of Pension Schemes

 By Accounting for Sustainability This top tips guidance is written for organizations that sponsor a pension scheme on the why and how to engage with your pension trustees on sustainable investing. Just as more and more companies are embedding social and environmental risk and opportunity into strategy and decision making, it is vital that their pension schemes follow suit. The impact that climate change and other environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks can have on value and returns is driving changes across...

April 2024

Pension Fund Trustees and Fiduciary Duties: Decision-making in the context of Sustainability and the subject of Climate Change

By Financial Markets Law Committee For pension funds, setting investment strategy, principles and policies and making investment decisions have all become more challenging in the context of sustainability and the subject of climate change.  This has given rise to renewed uncertainty over what the “fiduciary duties” or trust duties owed by trustees of pension funds require in this context. Since the pensions sector is a major allocator of capital, legal uncertainties affecting pension fund trustees have the potential to adversely affect...

November 2023

Sustainability of pension schemes: Building a smooth automatic balance mechanism with an application to the us social security

By Frédéric Gannon, Florence Legros & Vincent Touzé We build a “smooth” automatic balancing mecanism (S-ABM) which would result from an optimal tradeoff between increasing the receipts and reducing the expenditures of a pension scheme. The S-ABM obtains from minimizing a sum of discounted quadratic loss function under the constraint of an intertemporal budget balance. One advantage of this model of “optimal” adjustment is its ability to analyse various configurations in terms of ABMs by controlling the adjustment pace. Notably, this S-ABM...