July 2022
22Jul

Defined Benefit Risk Phase 2: Expert Interviews

By David G. Pitts Over the course of 2020 and 2021, the research team interviewed the following subjects: • Chief Financial Officer • Chief Risk Officer • Multiemployer Plan FSA • Public Plan FSA • Investment Consultant / FSA • Outsourced Chief Investment Officer / FSA • Canadian FSA / CERA Each interview lasted approximately one hour. All interviewees are senior practitioners in the defined benefit space. The interview notes include a faithful representation of the ideas discussed, with some changes in minor details to ensure the anonymity of the respondent. Executive...

July 22, 2022
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June 2022
24Jun

Greening Pensions: A Behavioural Perspective

By Alice Farrell, Kristina Londakova, Izzy Brennan, Jake Reynolds & Toby Park Through their pensions, the vast majority of people in the UK are investors, with pension pots collectively amounting to over £2.6 trillion.1 Investing a greater portion of this money sustainably - i.e. in businesses who have positive or neutral impacts on the environment and green technologies – could significantly accelerate our transition to a low-carbon society. While 68% of people say they would like their investments to be responsible...

June 24, 2022
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17Jun

LGBT CEOs and stock returns: Diagnosing rainbow ceilings and cliffs

By Savva Shanaev, Arina Skorochodova & Mikhail Vasenin This study is the first to investigate the implications of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender chief executive officers (LGBT CEOs) for stock performance, using an exhaustive sample of 26 LGBT publicly listed company CEOs since 2000 to document statistically and economically significant financial outperformance of LGBT-led firms. Stocks of companies with openly LGBT CEOs generate a monthly alpha of 0.69%-1.08%, robust to portfolio weighting schemes, estimation frequency, multi-factor asset-pricing models, factor multicollinearity,...

June 17, 2022
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17Jun

US. Wall Street Secrets Pit $75 Billion Pension Plan Against Trustee Tasked With Protecting It

When State Senator Katie Muth joined the board of the Pennsylvania teachers’ pension fund last year, she knew she had a lot to learn: With a college degree in athletic training, her financial education consisted largely of paying off her student loans. But she saw the unpaid trustee position at the $75 billion Public School Employees’ Retirement System as a way to protect teachers and state taxpayers — and an extension of her job as a lawmaker. Little did the...

June 17, 2022
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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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