The funding ratio is a financial indicator to measure the viability of pension funds. The paper analyzes how Swiss occupational pension funds' technical discount rate and asset allocation are related to the funding ratio. The paper shows that funds with weaker funding ratios apply higher rates...

Many college and university 403(b) plans restrict the menu of investment choices to funds offered by TIAA-CREF, the current manager of over half of all 403(b) contributions. Further, in the face of Internal Revenue Code changes that will take effect in 2006 and will make 403(b) plan ERISA...

We study how managers of funds created to invest for the long run behave when shielded from liquidity constraints and their investors' short-term needs. Using the universe of US target-date funds (TDFs), we document that asset managers exploit lower investor attention to deliver lower...

Target date funds in corporate retirement plans grew from $5B in 2000 to $734B in 2018, partly because federal regulation sanctioned these as default investments in automatic enrollment plans. We show that adopters delegated pension investment decisions to fund managers selected by plan...

Target date funds in corporate retirement plans grew from $5B in 2000 to $734B in 2018, partly because federal regulation sanctioned these as default investments in automatic enrollment plans. We show that adopters delegated pension investment decisions to fund managers selected by plan...

The availability of uncommitted funds is used as a measure of the financial quality of pension funds. Panel logit models with data from the Swiss Pension Fund Statistics are estimated to identify structural characteristics of funds, most of them under control of their foundation board, that...

Target-date funds (TDFs) have become the standard default investment choice for 401(k) plans since the 2006 Pension Protection Act approved them for this use. However, TDFs from different providers should not be considered perfect substitutes. They differ in several key areas: investment...

We examine the two approaches used by equity index funds to track their benchmark index. The first, full replication, mimics the index with exactness. The second, representative sampling, holds a subset of the index. We find that samplers trade 3-4 times more, have 30-50% higher expenses and...

Individual investors select high-fee index mutual funds despite the fact that the future payouts are nearly identical. We offer an explanation for this violation of the Law of One Price based on investor desire to diversify. While diversification in some settings may be beneficial, in the case...