June 2022
16Jun

Pension funds criticize Toyota for anti-green lobbying

Pension funds in Denmark and New York City expressed their dissatisfaction with Toyota Motor Co. Wednesday over what they see as lobbying activity that is slowing down a green transition. "We are extremely concerned that Toyota's lobbying activities are misaligned with its climate goals and its electric vehicle strategy," New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, fiduciary of the $265.9 billion New York City Retirement Systems, said in an emailed statement before the car maker's annual shareholder meeting Wednesday. "Toyota's approach puts...

June 16, 2022
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13Jun

Pension investors launch campaign against dual-class share structures

Leading UK and U.S. pension investors managing more than $1 trillion have launched a campaign to stop companies using dual-class share structures that concentrate voting power in the hands of certain shareholders at the expense of others. Launched by British railways pensions scheme Railpen and the non-profit Council of Institutional Investors (CII), others backing the Investor Coalition for Equal Votes (ICEV) include the New York City Comptroller's Office and the Washington State Investment Board. Companies with dual-class structures have two or...

June 13, 2022
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10Jun

UK. BMW disputes inclusion on Make My Money Matter net zero target list

BMW has contested its inclusion on a list of the UK’s 20 largest pension schemes to have allegedly not set net zero targets. The roster, compiled by Make My Money Matter, covers schemes with more than £200bn of assets under management, the campaign said. “Investments this size potentially enable 24mn tonnes of carbon to enter our atmosphere every year,” it claimed. The campaign said that it has been contacting the schemes for a year. They are a mix of corporate and...

June 10, 2022
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10Jun

LGBTQ and Finance

By Sanjukta Brahma, Konstantinos Gavriilidis, Vasileios Kallinterakis, Thanos Verousis & Mengyu Zhang Recent changes in workplace and corporate board diversity policies and a series of court rulings have signalled a fundamental change in the treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (henceforth LGBTQ) people in the corporate world. In this paper, we survey the burgeoning literature on the role of sexual orientation in finance. We show that LGBTQ-friendly policies affect organizational outcomes and enhance the quality of corporate governance....

June 10, 2022
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03Jun

Reporting on a Greener Future

By Maggie Williams As climate change and ESG stewardship become a central part of pension schemes’ investment strategy, identifying suitable performance measures and devising frameworks to report on them has also risen in importance. The Pensions Regulator and Department for Work and Pensions now requires schemes to use the Task Force on Climate-Related Disclosures framework (TCFD) to report on their portfolios – and from April 2022, large companies in the UK will also be subject to mandatory climate risk reporting, based...

June 3, 2022
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03Jun

Governance Issues Loom Over US Pension Funds

Fiscal year 2021 was a great year for public pensions. According to funding data from Pew Charitable Trusts, a decade of increasing pension contributions was bolstered by the reopening rally of 2021. As a result, public pensions in all 50 states saw their funding ratios top 80%, the highest level since before the Great Recession. By the end of fiscal 2021, public pensions had made the greatest progress in a century toward closing the gap between plan funding and...

June 3, 2022
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01Jun

The Rise Of Green Pension Funds

This marks another milestone in the pressure to be ‘green’ when investing. Scheme members are already expecting to see a responsible investment approach from their managers, adding to the pressure for trustees to produce a coherent and measured sustainability strategy. These disclosures will further fuel a movement towards responsible pension investing. In July 2021, pensions minister Guy Opperman described climate change in no uncertain terms, as a “major systemic financial risk and threat to the long-term sustainability of UK private...

June 1, 2022
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May 2022

People and Investor Attention to Climate Change
19May

People and Investor Attention to Climate Change

By Mauro Aliano, Franco Fiordelisi, Giuseppe Galloppo & Viktoriia Paimanova This paper empirically studies whether people and investors globally really see climate change as a major threat, as defined by United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Our identification strategy aims to investigate two research questions: (1) whether people attention to Climate Change varies depending on local natural disasters and (2) how does the climate change attention affect the stock price of local firms and, thus, the investors’ trading behavior....

May 19, 2022
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18May

US. Allianz subsidiary pleads guilty over a $7 billion investment implosion.

The German insurance firm Allianz will pay more than $6 billion over the implosion of a group of hedge funds two years ago that stuck public pensions, religious organizations, foundations and other investors with heavy losses. Read also US. DoL Urged to Help Pension Plans Make Climate Impact An American subsidiary of the insurer, Allianz Global Investors U.S., pleaded guilty Tuesday to securities fraud for failing to stop the scheme, which came to light after the funds collapsed early in the...

May 18, 2022
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13May

Are pension funds transparent enough about their investments?

The latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in April 2022, made clear that the window for preventing the worst of climate change is closing fast. Plans already in place are not enough to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, said the report, and more must be done to accelerate the energy transition. These efforts will require huge levels of capital. The UN has estimated that $90trn in infrastructure investment alone is needed by...

May 13, 2022
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