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...

This paper examines whether ties to portfolio firms' management via pension business relationships provides mutual funds with an informational advantage. Funds become related to portfolio companies when fund families serve as trustees for firms' employee pension plans. Selling by related funds...

The heavy reliance of Australian superannuation funds on service providers enables these entities to play an important role in fund operations and have a significant influence on the costs and investment performance of superannuation funds. The use of service providers creates a nexus of...

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...

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...

The paper discusses the limits of credit and capital subsidies to finance MSMEs in the presence of jobs-related externalities. Using a stylized model of the decision to lend to enterprises with different levels of risk, we show that instruments like credit guarantees are likely to exclude...

Since the financial crisis, the markets for Bank Loan (BL) and High Yield Bond (HYB) mutual funds (MFs) have grown significantly, with assets under management increasing from $19 billion and $75 billion to close to $117 billion and $225 billion, respectively, as of December 2018. This short...

This paper studies the real mutual fund performance accounting for the presences of lucky funds. We quantify the impact of luck with an innovative measure built on False Discovery Rate (FDR). These FDR measures compute the number and the proportion of fund with truly positive and negative...

How does sovereign risk affect investors' behavior? We answer this question using a novel database that combines sovereign default probabilities for 27 developed and emerging markets with monthly data on the portfolios of individual bond mutual funds. We first show that changes in yields do not...