The Australian superannuation system was founded on the assumption that market competition will deliver economic efficiency in a largely private defined contribution system. Since the Wallis Report (1997) explicitly articulated this view, total assets in the system have grown substantially...

This paper proposes an approach to design a national default option to maximize retirement savings in defined contribution superannuation, using a proportionate shareholding approach which minimizes total cost of investing for all investors.The paper provides a new rationale for passive...

Compared with large institutional pension funds, there is relatively little published research on small funds, which are defined in the Australian superannuation legislation as pension funds with less than five members. Small funds account for more than 20% of total pension assets and they are...

Investment performance studies of pension or mutual funds have overall been too statistically inconclusive to create definitive rankings to help investors make fund selection decisions. This paper presents an alternative approach based on comparing the pension or mutual fund firms themselves...

In the first paper, the lacklustre investment performance of Australian superannuation was attributed to the Retail sector. This second paper investigates potential explanations for this fact through an empirical attribution analysis of the impact of asset allocation, operational structure and...

This paper provides an overview of the financial performance trends of the Australian superannuation system in the period 1997-2016, based on audited accounting data. Strong contribution flows have allowed total assets to grow at an average annual rate of about ten percent to $2 trillion by June...

Using official data and new econometric models based on how the industry actually works, we show the benefits of scale for members are limited, and confined to the non-profit sector which is structured to incur relatively low fixed costs compared with much higher variable costs. In Australian...

The public's positive impression of Australian superannuation comes from the rapid asset growth of the system and selective sampling inherent in focusing on performance of funds and options may over-estimate the performance of the whole system by two percent per annum due to survivorship bias....