On the Size of the Active Management Industry

We argue that active management’s popularity is not puzzling despite the industry’s poor track record. Our explanation features decreasing returns to scale: As the industry’s size increases, every manager’s ability to outperform passive benchmarks declines. The poor track record occurred before the growth of indexing modestly reduced the share of active management to its current size. At this size, better performance is expected by investors who believe in decreasing returns to scale. Such beliefs persist because persistence in industry size causes learning about returns to scale to be slow. The industry should shrink only moderately if its underperformance continues.

Rational Attention Allocation Over the Business Cycle

The literature assessing whether mutual fund managers have skill typically regards skill as an immutable attribute of the manager or the fund. Yet, many measures of skill, such as returns, alphas, and measures of stock-picking and market-timing, appear to vary over the business cycle. Because time-varying ability seems far-fetched, these results call into question the existence of skill itself. This paper offers a rational explanation, arguing that skill is a general cognitive ability that can be applied to different tasks, such as picking stocks or market timing. Using tools from the rational inattention literature, we show that the relative value of these tasks varies cyclically. The model generates indirect predictions for the dispersion and returns of fund portfolios that distinguish this explanation from others and which are supported by the data. In turn, these findings offer useful evidence to support the notion of rational attention allocation.

That Courage is not inconsistent with Caution: Foreign Currency Hedging for Superannuation Funds

Surveys of Australian superannuation funds verify that most international bond holdings, but not equity holdings, are hedged for currency risk. We compare the mean-variance efficiency of this practice with two alternative strategies: a conventional forward hedge; and a selective hedge triggered by the sign of the interest differential. These strategies produce optimal allocations which stochastically dominate the restricted portfolio according to Barrett-Donald (2003) tests. The advantages of alternative hedging strategies remain when the vector of sample mean returns is replaced by forecasts. Selective hedging works best for equities; conventional hedging for bonds. Adding unhedged bonds does not improve outcomescurrency hedging; portfolio allocation; stochastic dominance

Real estate stock selection and attribute preferences

The majority of studies that explore property portfolio construction and management strategies utilise highly aggregated ex-post data, but stock selection is known to be a significant determinant of portfolio performance. Thus, here we look at stock selection, focusing on the choices faced by investors, necessitating the collection and analysis of primary data, carried out utilising conjoint analysis. This represents a new step in property research, with the data collection undertaken using a simulation exercise. This enables fund managers to make hypothetical purchase decisions, viewing properties comprising a realistic bundle of attributes and making complex contemporaneous trade-offs between attributes, subject to their stated market and economic forecasts and sector specialism. In total 51 fund managers were surveyed, producing 918 purchase decisions for analysis, with additional data collected regarding fund and personal characteristics. The results reveal that ‘fixed’ property characteristics (location and obsolescence) are dominant in the decision-making process, over and above ‘manageable’ tenant and lease characteristics which can be explicitly included within models of probabilities of income variation. This reveals investors are making ex-ante risk judgements and are considering post acquisition risk management strategies. The study also reveals that behavioural factors affect acquisition decisions

Prudent Investors: The Asset Allocation of Public Pension Plans

After 2000, the vast majority of defined benefit (DB) pension plans encountered a decrease in their funding ratios, largely due to a drop in asset prices. It is possible that public sector pension plans may have acted imprudently by chasing returns, once they encountered underfunding. We identify four indicators for DB plans’ imprudent investment behavior: no portfolio rebalancing, employer conflicts of interest, trustee conflicts of interest, and failure to implement best investment practices. To see if public sector pension plans rebalance their portfolios, we use data from the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Funds, dating from 1952 to 2007. To test for the remaining three hypotheses, we use data from the Census’ State and Local Government Employee Retirement Systems data base, where consistent data for state and local government plans are available from 1993 to 2005. Our results suggest that there is no evidence that public sector plans systematically engaged in imprudent investment behavior and that this did not systematically differ after 2000 from the earlier period.

Impact at Scale: Policy Innovation for Institutional Investment With Social and Environmental Benefit

Explores policy options to maximize impact investing opportunities for institutional investors and accelerate the development of impact investing practices and products. Presents case studies of and insights from investors and service providers

Robust Performance Attribution Analysis in Investment Management

This dissertation investigates robust optimization models for performance attribution analysis in investment management. Specifically, an investment manager seeks to evaluate the performance of fund managers who manage funds he might invest his clients\u27 money in. A key difficulty for the investment manager is to quantify the fund manager\u27s skill when he may not know the fund manager\u27s allocation precisely. This introduces two main sources of uncertainty for the investment manager: the stock returns and the fund allocations. This dissertation proposes and analyzes robust, quantitative models to address this challenge. We study a robust counterpart to the mean-variance framework when the fund managers\u27 precise allocations are uncertain but belong to known intervals and must sum to one for each manager, present an algorithm to solve the problem efficiently and analyze the investment manager\u27s allocation in the various funds as a function of the benchmark return. Further, we consider the case where the stock returns are also represented as uncertain parameters belonging to a polyhedral set, the size of which is defined by a parameter called the budget of uncertainty, and the investment manager seeks to maximize his worst-case return. We describe how to solve this problem efficiently and analyze how the investment manager\u27s degree of diversification and his specific allocations in the funds vary with the budget of uncertainty

The role of pension funds as institutional investors in emerging markets

In recent years, a growing number of Emerging Market Economies, as well as most advanced countries, have witnessed growth of pension funds as institutional investors. This has often occurred in the wake of pension reform shifting retirement income provision from pay-as-you-go to funding. The ongoing ageing of the population and financing difficulties of pay-as-you-go systems suggests that such reforms will become yet more common in the future. Accordingly, it is important to analyse the impact of institutional investment on the economy. In this context, our aim is to address the role of pension funds as institutional investors in financial development, and the wider effects of such financial development on economic performance. We note inter alia some of the ways in which the behaviour and impact of institutional investors might differ in emerging market economies from advanced countries as well as policy issues

Upgrading investment regulations in second pillar pension systems : a proposal for Colombia

The passivity of the demand for pension products is one of the striking features of mandatory pension systems. Consequently, the provision of multiple investment alternatives to households (multifund schemes) does not ensure that contributions are invested efficiently. In addition, despite the theoretical findings that short term return maximization is not conductive to long-term return maximization, the regulatory framework of pension fund management companies puts excessive emphasis on short-term maximization. Therefore, it is not obvious that typical regulatory framework of pension funds is conductive to optimal pensions. By establishing a set of default options on investment portfolios, this paper proposes a mechanism to align the incentives of the pension fund management companies with the long-term objectives of the contributors. The paper provides a methodology, which is subsequently applied to Colombia.Debt Markets,Emerging Markets,Financial Literacy,Mutual Funds,Investment and Investment Climate