This paper investigates the financial risk-taking behavior of pension funds since 2000. I assemble a new database containing portfolio holdings of more than 100 pension funds from 14 advanced economies. The study reveals three key findings. First, I show that pension fund portfolios have become...

This paper uses a unique security-level data set to demonstrate that foreign institutional investors shift their U.S. corporate bond portfolios toward bonds with higher credit spreads when U.S. monetary policy tightens, which reflects institutional factors related to nominal return targets and...

Using investment policy data of 857 Dutch pension funds during 1999–2006, we develop three indicators of investor sophistication. The indicators show that pension funds’ strategic portfolio choices are often based on coarse and less sophisticated approaches. First, most pension funds round...

The proliferation of unconstrained mutual funds calls into question the effectiveness of retail investor protections under the Investment Company Act of 1940. Analyzing trading data and prospectuses of a hand-selected sample of all unconstrained mutual funds launched from 2010 through 2015...