Political Representation and Governance: Evidence from the Investment Decisions of Public Pension Funds

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (5) ◽  
pp. 2041-2086 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEKSANDAR ANDONOV ◽  
YAEL V. HOCHBERG ◽  
JOSHUA D. RAUH
Author(s):  
William L. Megginson ◽  
Diego Lopez ◽  
Asif I. Malik

State-owned investors (SOIs), including sovereign wealth funds and public pension funds, have $27 trillion in assets under management in 2020, making these funds the third largest group of asset owners globally. SOIs have become the largest and are among the most important private equity investors, and they are key investors in other alternative asset investments such as real estate, infrastructure, and hedge funds. SOIs are also leaders in promoting environmental, social, and governance policies and corporate social responsibility policies in investee companies. We document the rise of SOIs, assess their current investment policies, and describe how their state ownership both constrains and enhances their investment opportunity sets. We survey the most impactful recent academic research on sovereign wealth funds, public pension funds, and their closest financial analogs, private pension funds. We also introduce a new Governance-Sustainability-Resilience Scoreboard for SOIs and survey research examining their role in promoting good corporate governance. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Financial Economics, Volume 13 is November 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yordanka Hristova ◽  
◽  
◽  

The article examines the growing threat of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the Bulgarian pension market. The applied investment regulatory approaches are considered an objective necessity and a prerequisite for making investment decisions in the context of a pandemic situation. The main trends of the return, realized by the pension funds for the previous and the current year, and its ratio to the alternative losses are indicated through an analysis of statistical data in the context of the first pensions granted to the insured persons of the universal pension funds.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (21) ◽  
pp. 5924 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sangki Lee ◽  
Insu Kim ◽  
Chung-hun Hong

In this study, we explore the stock market’s response to new information that a firm has been included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) in Korea. In addition, we investigate which investor group contributes to the changes, if any significant increase in returns is found, after a firm’s incorporation into the DJSI. This study aims to identify which investors value corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the Korean stock market and examine whether the government-led campaigns for CSR have affected private sector investors, as well as those from the public sector. We find statistically significant abnormal returns for firms after their first listing in the index, implying that investors in Korean markets consider a firm’s inclusion in the DJSI as good news for the firm value. Using a unique dataset from the Korea Exchange (KRX) on investors, we classify investors into four groups: individual investors, public pension funds, other institutional investors, and foreign investors. Unlike prior studies that focus only on the existence of abnormal returns, we investigate the trading behavior of each investor group for such announcements. We find that it is mainly the buying pressure of public pension funds that generates abnormal returns. By contrast, we cannot find statistically significant results for the other investor groups. This result implies that the government-led campaign for CSR has only had limited effects in the Korean stock market, and that awareness of CSR in the private sector should be improved.


2019 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl-Christian Trönnberg ◽  
Sven Hemlin

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of pension fund managers investment thinking when confronted with challenging investment decisions. The study focuses on the theoretical question of how dual thinking processes in experts’ investment decision-making emerge. This question has attracted interest in economic psychology but has not yet been answered. Here, it is explored in the context of pension funds.Design/methodology/approachThe sample included 22 pension fund managers. The authors explored their decision-making by applying the critical incident interview technique, which entailed collecting investment decisions that fund managers retrieved from recent memory (Flanagan, 1954). Questions concerned the investment situation, the decision-making process and the challenges and uncertainties the fund managers faced.FindingsMany of the 61 critical incidents examined concerned challenging (mostly stock) investments based on extensive analysis (e.g. reliance on external analysts for advice; analysis of massive amounts of hard company and stock market information; scrutiny of company reports and personal meetings with CEOs). However, fund managers to a high degree based their decisions on soft information judgments such as experience and qualitative judgements of teams. The authors found heuristics, intuitive thinking, biases (sunk cost effects) and social influences in investment decision-making.Research limitations/implicationsThe sample is small and not randomly selected.Practical implicationsThe authors suggest anti-bias training and better acquaintance with human forecasting limitations for pension fund managers.Originality/valuePension fund managers’ investment thinking has not previously been investigated. The authors show the types of investment situations in which analytical and intuitive thinking and biases occur.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document