In Australia, pension fund trustees choose investment managers on behalf of members. We investigate the structure and performance of delegated investment choice in the Australian retirement incomes sector. We find that funds where trustees employ many managers generate higher risk-adjusted...

The new Simplified Superannuation regulations for Australian superannuation provide tax concessions to retirement income streams which comply with legislated minimum drawdown rules. We evaluate these new drawdown rules against four alternatives, including three formula-based ‘rules of thumb’...

: We report the results of two laboratory experiments that study how university student and staff participants chose retirement savings investment options using ‘user-friendly’ information prescribed by regulators. We demonstrate that choices of more than 20% of participants cannot be...

We construct a time-varying factor model of hedge fund returns that accounts for market risk, leverage, illiquidity and tail events. We also adjust for database biases arising from voluntary self-reporting. Using a constant beta model, we find no evidence of excess returns for the average hedge...

We derive and estimate the optimal disbursement from an infinitely-lived charitable trust with an Epstein-Zin-Weil utility function, given general Markovian returns to wealth. We analyze two special cases: where spending is a power function of last period's wealth and the endowment uses 'payout...

Little empirical work has been done on the return properties of infrastructure as an asset class despite increased allocations by institutional investors. Managers claim infrastructure investments offer real return benefits via a combination of monopolistic and defensive assets. We build a...

Existing research suggests the average private equity* manager does not create excess returns over public markets net of fees. We confirm this result using a factor model that allows for leverage, illiquidity and volatility clustering. The model explains 70 to 90 per cent of the variation in...

Detecting contagion during financial crises requires demarcation of crisis periods. This paper presents a method for endogenous dating of both the start and finish of crises, coupled with the statistical detection of contagion effects. We couple smooth transition functions with structural GARCH...

Regulations restricting investment by pension funds in high risk and foreign assets may quarantine member accounts from contagious transmissions during financial crises. This paper analyses contagion from US equity markets to emerging market autarchic assets (Colombian private pension funds)...