Defined benefit pension funds invest in illiquid asset classes for return, diversification or liability hedging reasons. So far, little is known about factors influencing how much they invest in illiquid assets. We conjecture that liquidity and capital requirements are pivotal in this decision....

Mutual funds' exposure to corporate bonds has brought concerns about risks arising from liquidity transformation back to the fore. With a focus on fund asset liquidity and investors, this paper explores the flow-performance relationship and the liquidity management of funds in the presence of...

Mutual funds' exposure to corporate bonds has brought concerns about risks arising from liquidity transformation back to the fore. With a focus on fund asset liquidity and investors, this paper explores the flow-performance relationship and the liquidity management of funds in the presence of...

A defined contribution pension plan allows consumption to be redistributed from the plan member's working life to retirement in a manner that is consistent with the member's personal preferences. The plan's optimal funding and investment strategies therefore depend on the desired profile of...

Since 2007, the board of trustees of the ABN AMRO Pension Fund has applied an innovative approach to determine its strategic investment policy. The strategic asset allocation is selected implicitly by choosing the pension fund's set of risk-reward characteristics without knowing the underlying...

This paper provides new evidence about returns to scale in asset management, and their connection with capital flows to funds by investors. Equity mutual funds have diminishing returns to scale at the industry level, while hedge and fixed income funds have increasing returns to scale. The...

We study the equilibrium implications of a multi-asset economy in which asset managers are subject to different benchmarks, and demonstrate how heterogeneous benchmarking generates a mechanism through which fundamental shocks propagate across assets. Fluctuations in asset managers' capital...

This paper introduces a general continuous-time mathematical framework for solution of dynamic mean-variance control problems. We obtain theoretical results for two classes of functionals: the first one depends on the whole trajectory of the controlled process and the second one is based on its...

Over the past decade, European investment funds have substantially increased their investment in dollar-denominated assets to more than 3.8 USD trillion, which should give raise to substantial currency hedging if US investor have reciprical currency exposures in their international portfolios....

Analysis of required expected return disclosures by public pension funds in individual asset classes reveals a reliance on past performance in setting return expectations. These extrapolative expectations operate through the expected risk premium and occur across all risky asset classes. Pension...