April 2022

The New Corporate Governance

The New Corporate Governance

By Oliver D. Hart & Luigi Zingales In the last few years, there has been a dramatic increase in shareholder engagement on environmental and social issues. In some cases shareholders are pushing companies to take actions that may reduce market value. It is hard to understand this behavior using the dominant corporate governance paradigm based on shareholder value maximization. We explain how jurisprudence has sustained this criterion in spite of its economic weaknesses. To overcome these weaknesses we propose the...

Environmental, Social and Governance Considerations in Pension Plans

Environmental, Social and Governance Considerations in Pension Plans

By Paul Williams & Elizabeth Harker Speaking at the United Nations Climate Change Conference ("COP26") in October 2021, the UK Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Thérèse Coffey, said that pension schemes can become a "superpower" in fighting climate change and propelling the world to net zero. But to what extent does the legal landscape within which pension schemes operate allow them to perform this role, and indeed to what extent should they be performing this role? Here in the...

The Association between Mandated Environmental Liability Recognition and Voluntary ESG Disclosure Quality

By Daniel A. Bens, Cai Chen & Peter R. Joos We examine the association between mandated Asset Retirement Obligations (ARO), i.e., environmental clean-up costs of normal operations estimated on the balance sheet, and the quality of voluntary ESG disclosures. We hypothesize that when firms recognize larger AROs with higher accuracy that this effort will spillover into enhanced voluntary disclosure of a broad range of ESG outcomes. Empirical evidence supports this hypothesis. In a sample of environmentally sensitive industries, we find...

ESG and Private Market Assets: Pension and Insurance Investors Shifting the Trillions (2022 – 2026)

ESG and Private Market Assets: Pension and Insurance Investors Shifting the Trillions (2022 – 2026)

By M. Nicolas J. Firzli, Nick Sherry & Guan Seng Khoo The co-authors of the article, are amongst the original coiners of term such as “infrastructure as an asset class” and “pension superpowers.” They also predicted, at the onset of the Covid Crisis, that a “historic realignment on the asset allocation front is happening precisely at the moment when ESG is moving centre stage: even in once staunchly neoliberal jurisdictions like Texas, Alaska or Switzerland, the smart money is betting...

March 2022

Pensions and the green transition: policy and political issues at stake

Pensions and the green transition: policy and political issues at stake

By David Natali, Michele Raitano & Giulia Valenti Pension policy has gone through an intense period of reform over the past few decades. However, further changes are likely to take place in the near future. Major global trends, not only population ageing but also globalisation, technological innovation and climate change, are going to shape socioeconomic and labour organisation and influence macroeconomic trends and will thus have an impact on the adequacy and long-term sustainability of pension policy. This paper focuses...

A Descriptive Analysis on Effect of Corporate Governance on Investor’s Decision

By Dsouza Prima Frederick The article studies the impact of internal factors and external factors influencing an investor’s investment decision. The information for the study was obtained from secondary sources like journal papers, magazines and books. Human psychology has an internal role in investing choice, whereas corporate governance is an external influence. Corporate governance plays a major role in the investment decision-making process by revealing all elements of business information, but investors understand the information according to their own assessments and assumptions...

Mainstreaming the Trasition to a Net-Zero Economy

Mainstreaming the Trasition to a Net-Zero Economy

By Group of Thirty The evidence that climate change is posing unprecedented risks to our livelihoods is overwhelming. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) have reached the highest levels in 800,000 years. Over the last three decades, the number of registered severe weather events has tripled. The cost of weather-related insurance losses has increased eightfold over the past decade, to an average of US$60 billion; and average uninsured losses from weather events have increased sevenfold. Still, these effects pale in significance...

February 2022

Assessing the Macroeconomic Impact of Structural Reforms in Ukraine

Assessing the Macroeconomic Impact of Structural Reforms in Ukraine

By Anil Ari & Gabor Pula Ukraine’s economic performance has been anemic since the early 1990s. A major impediment to productivity growth has been low investment, held back by lack of strong and independent institutions. This paper aims to assess the major areas of institutional weakness in Ukraine and quantify the long-term growth impact of catching-up to Poland in terms of the quality of major economic institutions and market development. Our analysis identifies the legal system as the area where...

Global Pension Assets Study – 2022

By Thinking Ahead Institute The Global Pension Assets Study estimates global pension fund assets across 22 major pension markets (the P22). These geographies now total a record US$56.6 trillion in pension assets and account for 76% of the GDP of these economies. The study, conducted by WTW and the Thinking Ahead Institute since the 1990s, includes an analysis of the seven largest markets (the P7): Australia, Canada, Japan, Netherlands, Switzerland, UK and US comprise 92% of total pension assets, unchanged...

Morningstar’s Annual Target-Date Strategy Landscape

Morningstar’s Annual Target-Date Strategy Landscape

By  MorningStar The coronavirus pandemic presented the biggest challenge for target-date strategies since the financial crisis of 2008. Target-date strategies play a central role in many Americans' retirement success by often serving as the default investment option in their defined-contribution retirement plans. Although targetdate performance rebounded sharply from the first quarter’s bear market, the fallout from the economic shock continued to weigh on investor contributions throughout the year. In this report, we examine the impact of the economic uncertainty created by the pandemic on...