March 2021
02Mar

Seeing the forest for the trees: Why pension funds should take another look at forestry as an asset class

By Fiona Stewart, Samantha Power Pension funds invest our savings over decades, so it is not surprising that they have a long history of investing in forestry assets. Swedish investors can trace the ‘roots’ of forestry investment back to the 13th century. In the modern era, pension funds began investing in forestry about 50 years ago, in the Southern United States. Since then, this modality of investment has expanded across the U.S. and Canada, as well as in Oceania, Europe,...

March 2, 2021
Articles, Blogs, ESG, Investment,
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February 2021
19Feb

Global Pension Assets Study – 2021

By Willis Tower Watson The Global Pension Assets Study covers 22 major pension markets (the P22), which now totals US$52,522 billion in pension assets and account for 80% of the GDP of these economies. The study includes an analysis of the seven largest markets (the P7) which includes Australia, Canada, Japan, Netherlands, Switzerland, UK and US and comprises 92% of total pension assets. Get the book here

February 19, 2021
Books, Investment, Pension Management, Reports, System Sustainability, , , ,
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December 2020

23Dec

How an ERISA Fiduciary May Try to Save the World

By Albert Feuer On November 13, 2020, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) promulgated a final regulation regarding the investment duties of an ERISA fiduciary in selecting either direct plan investments or investment alternatives to make available to participants and beneficiaries of self-directed plans (the “Investment Duties Regulation”). The Regulation, like the proposed form of the Regulation, which provoked more than 8,000 public comments which were overwhelming critical, was intended to discourage what the DOL called ESG or sustainable...

December 23, 2020
Articles, Investment, Pension design, ,
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November 2020

27Nov

Longevity Risk and Hedging Solutions

By Guy Coughlan, David P. Blake, Richard D. MacMinn, Andrew J. G. Cairns, Kevin Dowd Longevity risk – the risk of unanticipated increases in life expectancy – has only recently been recognized as a significant global risk that has materially raised the costs of providing pensions and annuities. We first discuss historical trends in the evolution of life expectancy and then analyze the hedging solutions that have been developed for managing longevity risk. One set of solutions has come...

November 27, 2020
Articles, Investment, Pension Management, ,
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12Nov

Defining Climate-Aligned Investment: An Analysis of Sustainable Finance Taxonomy Development

By Aneil Tripathy, Lionel Mok, Katie House The green bond market has grown rapidly since its inception in 2007. Climate-aligned standards provide investors with the confidence that their investments deliver a measurable climate benefit. Serving as a benchmark, these standards demonstrate alignment with the Paris Agreement, against which green bond issuers can then report compliance. This paper draws on the authors’ experiences as practitioners and researchers helping to develop the Climate Bonds Standard and the European Union’s Sustainable Finance...

November 12, 2020
Articles, Investment, ,
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October 2020

29Oct

Life-Care Tontines

By Peter Hieber, Nathalie Lucas This paper builds on the advantage of pooling mortality and morbidity risks, and their inherent natural hedge. We focus on classical mutual risk pooling schemes, i.e. tontines, and introduce a ``life-care tontine", which in addition to retirement income targets the needs of long-term care coverage for an ageing population. This scheme reduces adverse selection costs and is actuarially fair at each time. Pooling heterogeneous risks (i.e. different age groups) is shown to reduce overall...

October 29, 2020
Articles, Investment, Pension design, ,
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23Oct

Annual survey of investment regulation of pension funds and other pension providers 2020

By The OECD This report describes the main quantitative investment regulations that pension funds are subject to in OECD and a selection of non-OECD countries (most of which are IOPS Member countries). This report also covers the investment rules for other pension providers (such as life insurance companies) for some countries, such as Denmark, France, Ireland, Korea, Latvia and Sweden among OECD countries and Jordan among non-OECD jurisdictions. The information reflects the rules in force at the end of...

October 23, 2020
Books, Investment, Regulation, Reports,
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23Oct

Reconsidering Risk Aversion

By Daniel J. Benjamin, Mark Alan Fontana, Miles S. Kimball Risk aversion is typically inferred from real or hypothetical choices over risky lotteries, but such “untutored” choices may reflect mistakes rather than preferences. We develop a procedure to disentangle preferences from mistakes: after eliciting untutored choices, we confront participants with their choices that are inconsistent with expected-utility axioms (broken down enough to be self-evident) and allow them to reconsider their choices. We demonstrate this procedure via a survey about...

October 23, 2020
Articles, Investment, Savings, ,
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20Oct

Mercer CFA Institute Global Pension Index 2020

By Merced CFA Institute What makes a world-class pension system in 2020? Pension systems around the world are facing additional pressures in 2020. The widespread economic impact due to COVID-19 has had both immediate and long-term implications for retirees. Additionally, increasing life expectancies and rising pressure on public resources to support the health and welfare of older citizens will affect how citizens around the world will retire in the mid to long-term. “The economic recession caused by...

October 20, 2020
Adequacy, Books, Investment, Pension Management, Reports, Sustainability, , , , , ,
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September 2020

30Sep

Mobilizing Private Finance for Nature

By Benoit Blarel, Giovanni Ruta, Olga Gavryliuk, Pauline Poisson, Fiona Stewart, Samantha Power, Benjamin Guillon, Irina Likhachova & Lisa Choux (The world Bank Group) Biodiversity and ecosystem services, or nature for short, underpin many aspects of economic activity and are deteriorating at an unprecedented level, with potentially far-reaching implications for economies worldwide. Sustained ecosystem damage can trigger regime shifts and generate systemic impacts on human well-being and economies. For example, the degradation of natural ecosystems has been associated with an increase in the probability...

September 30, 2020
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