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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

This article provides a broad treatment of transparency and the specific normative data and information that are essential to make transparency effective for meeting the normative needs of shareholders. The template offered here is a tool for providing transparency in normative mutual fund...

We build a model of mutual fund competition in which a fraction of investors, unsophisticated, exhibit a preference for familiarity, while sophisticated investors are free of familiarity bias. Funds differ in two dimensions: quality and familiarity. Unsophisticated investors exhibit varying...