Asset Allocations in a Thai Defined Contribution Fund : A Behavioural Experiment Conditioned on Financial Expertise

This paper reports the results of a behavioural finance experiment on the ability of Thai individuals to make informed investment decisions under a defined contribution self-management option. Using an asset allocation dataset from members of the Thai Government Pension Fund (TGPF) and a control sample of financially knowledgeable individuals (MBA finance students), we report that TGPF members are relatively more risk averse, exhibit a greater home investment bias, and over-react to market price movements. Financially savvy MBA students hold more shares and international securities, and earn greater long term returns. The fact that the worse performing TGPF member allocations outperform the TGPF default plan, along with strong preferences for time liquidity diversification, provide challenges for TGPF managers to increase their financial engineering and to continue to lobby for restrictive investment ceilings to be revised