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The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have created societal and political pressure for pension funds to address sustainable investing. We run two field surveys (n = 1,669, n = 3,186) with a pension fund that grants its members a real vote on its sustainable-investment policy. Two-thirds of participants are willing to expand the fund’s engagement with companies based on selected SDGs, even when they expect engagement to hurt financial performance. Support remains strong after the fund implements the choice. A key reason is participants’strong social preferences.

We undertake an assessment of our two decades of research on financial literacy, building on our empirical research and theoretical work casting financial knowledge as a form of investment in human capital. We also draw on recent data to determine who is the most—and least—financially savvy in the United States, and we highlight the similarity of our results in other countries. A number of convincing studies is now available, from which we draw conclusions about the effects and consequences of financial illiteracy, and what can be done to fill these gaps. We conclude by offering our thoughts on implications for teaching, policy, and future research.

This paper utilizes the county-by-county rollout of China’s New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS ) and finds that, among age-eligible people, the pension scheme leads to higher household income and food expenditure, less farmwork, better health, and lower mortality. In addition, the NRPS shifts age-ineligible adults from farmwork to nonfarmwork but does not significantly affect their income, expenditure, or health. No significant evidence shows that the NRPS affects private transfers or health behaviors. These findings provide relevant evidence of the impacts of social pensions on individual behaviors and welfare for developing countries today and developed countries in the past.

The unique regulation of U.S. public pension funds links their liability discount rate to the expected return on assets, which gives them incentives to invest more in risky assets in order to report a better funding status. Comparing public and private pension funds in the United States, Canada, and Europe, we find that U.S. public pension funds act on their regulatory incentives. U.S. public pension funds with a higher level of underfunding per participant, as well as funds with more politicians and elected plan participants serving on the board, take more risk and use higher discount rates. The increased risk-taking by U.S. public funds is negatively related to their performance.

Participants in defined contribution (DC) retirement plans rarely adjust their portfolio allocations, suggesting that their investment choices and consequent money flows are sticky and not discerning. However, participants' inertia could be offset by DC plan sponsors, who adjust the plan's investment options. We examine these countervailing influences on flows into U.S. mutual funds. We find that flows into funds from DC assets are more volatile and exhibit more performance sensitivity than non-DC flows, primarily due to adjustments to the investment options by the plan sponsors. Thus, DC retirement money is less sticky and more discerning than non-DC money.

Default contribution rates for 401(k) pension plans powerfully influence choices. Potential causes include opt-out costs, procrastination, inattention, and psychological anchoring. Using realistically parameterized models, we show how the optimal default, the magnitude of the welfare effects, and the degree of normative ambiguity depend on the behavioral model, the scope of the choice domain deemed welfare-relevant, the use of penalties for passive choice, and other 401(k) plan features. While results are theory-specific, our analysis provides reasonably robust justifications for setting the default either at the highest contribution rate matched by the employer or—contrary to common wisdom—at zero.

This paper investigates whether mutual fund families acting as service providers in 401(k) plans display favoritism toward their own affiliated funds. Using a handcollected data set on the menu of investment options offered to plan participants, we show that fund deletions and additions are less sensitive to prior performance for affiliated than unaffiliated funds. We find no evidence that plan participants undo this affiliation bias through their investment choices. Finally, we find that the subsequent performance of poorly performing affiliated funds indicates that this favoritism is not information driven.

This study empirically analyses the exclusion of companies from investors' investment universe due to a company's business model (sector-based exclusion) or due to a company's violations of international norms (norm-based exclusion). We conduct a time-series analysis of the performance implications of the exclusion decisions of two leading Nordic investors, Norway's Government Pension Fund-Global (GPFG) and Sweden's AP-funds. We find that their portfolios of excluded companies do not generate an abnormal return relative to the funds' benchmark index. While the exclusion portfolios show higher risk than the respective benchmark, this difference is only statistically significant for the case of GPFG. These findings suggest that the exclusion of the companies generally does not harm funds' performance. We interpret these findings as indicative that with exclusionary screening, as practiced by the sample funds, asset owners can meet the ethical objectives of their beneficiaries without compromising financial returns.

There are many ways to construct a company’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) score or rating, involving different combinations of financial and nonfinancial inputs. Determining the most influential criteria for firm performance may be overlooked in the rush to “do some ESG.” In this study, the authors deconstruct ESG ratings performance at the E, S, and G pillar levels and use the most common key issues indicators that underlie ESG scores. They find that the time horizon used has an important bearing on the indicators’ significance. In the short term, they find that governance is the dominant pillar because it strongly reflects event risks, such as fraud. In the long term, however, environmental and social indicators became more important because issues such as carbon emissions tended to be more cumulative, presenting erosion risks to long-term performance. The authors also find that a more balanced and industry-specific weighting of E, S, and G issues showed better long-term relevance than the individual pillar indicators alone. TOPICS: Equity portfolio management, ESG investing, pension funds, foundations & endowments, performance measurement, wealth management, risk management Key Findings ▪ Aggregating environmental, social, and governance pillars into a total ESG rating added value in terms of performance and risk. ▪ Governance indicators showed the greatest significance in the short term because they have tended to materialize as event risks that immediately affected stock prices. ▪ However, some E and S indicators have developed slowly but have had long-lasting financial effects (erosion risks).

Regulation Fair Disclosure was passed in 2000 in response to the concern that certain investors were gaining selective access to privileged firm information. In spite of the passage of this regulation, some investors continue to meet privately with executives. Using a unique set of proprietary records of all one-on-one meetings between senior management and investors for a New York Stock Exchange-traded firm, we investigate the impact of private meetings on investor decisions. We find that when investors meet privately with management they make more informed trading decisions. This improvement in trading is concentrated in hedge funds, but is not present for investment advisors or pension funds. Overall, our results suggest that private meetings help a select group of investors make more informed trading decisions.